tabacoychanel

( Kage Baker, Gillian Bradshaw, Ada Palmer )

( it's been a while )

hp | The Age of Lies by TheDivineComedian (24k Marauders + Regulus Black) This fic asks the criminally underrated question “why does Sirius always get to be the smartass of this friendgroup” and proceeds to give Remus zingers for dayssssss. It’s great. It’s an extremely angsty fic, 90% pain-to-humor ratio but the humor is dead on and the character work—especially the Peter POV—I have seldom seen anything to equal it. The millisecond I finished leaving kudos I downloaded a copy because who knows when one’s favorite fics will get taken down by the author. Like, I’m not saying I’m on this “Sirius thinks Remus is a Death Eater” pain train for the wand jokes (that’s what all the Polyjuice-precaution security questions amount to: dick jokes) … but I’m not not saying that either.

hp | sleeper (177k gen) Harry visits an alternate dimension where he is BFFs with Sirius’s son and Draco’s younger sister. Grindelwald is Chancellor, nobody’s ever heard of Dumbledore, and Tom Riddle is the new DADA professor. This story took a sec to get going but it’s reliably funny even before it went anywhere (Regulus is alive, and his terrible twins are named Castor and Pollux) and it does indeed go to some interesting places.

hp | House Proud by astolat (23k Drarry) well i didn’t glean any new insights re: Harry or Draco but I sure learned a lot about astolat. fantastic, of course—top-notch work.

hp | A Keen Observer by DeepDownSlytherin (150k Andromeda/Ted) Andy Black at Hogwarts, Years 1 through 7. I gotta say, Ted Tonks is a wonderful supporting character but the story is really about the three Black sisters, and how they grew apart. Sirius is a really useful foil here since he got himself disowned first, and while Andy ends up in the same place she doesn’t arrive there the same way; she doesn’t flare hot the way Sirius and Bellatrix do.

black sails | you and i survived by youremyqueen (23k Charles/Jack/Anne pre-canon) This right here is everything I love about Black Sails, a show steeped in violence and rough sex—two things I don’t particularly care for—that somehow manages to depict a plethora of healthy, positive, emotionally fulfilling relationships? And that doesn’t equate “relationship” with “romantic liaison”? This fic is so many things. It’s first of all an epic takedown of toxic hyper-masculinity. It’s Jack-pov, and Jack is my forever favorite. But it really prods hard at the bundle of walking contradictions that is Charles, and Jack, and Anne too. Jack to Charles: “If you want me to be stiff and silent, you’ll have to marry me first.” “If unencumbered understanding and acceptance is Jack’s conception of love, then this is Vane’s: a drowning love.” Charles: “But you’re not easy to conquer, that’s the trick. You just pretend.”

mcu | cascades. by orange-crushed (100k Stucky) Steve is teleporting erratically and involuntarily—literally falling apart into atoms—until the Winter Soldier shows up. Bucky is the thread that draws Steve home, always. It’s monumentally good. Featuring: No Avengers but plenty of Howling Commandos. “Steve would recognize that expression through a five-dollar telescope, looking down at earth from the moon.” “He spent so many years dreaming about it that he was afraid to meet it awake.” “I will kill anyone who comes for him. With my own two hands. I swear before God. Tell your friends.” “I pick every damn fight, but you pick ones that matter.”

asoiaf | two halves of a soul by angel-deux (40k Braime soulmark + highschool au) The one where Theon lives in the Starks’ basement. This is the Platonic ideal of a high school AU. It made me smile and snicker in equal measure and it’s just sincere enough without delving too deep into the endless dramallama of high school.

trc | King by the Roadside by nimmieamee (165k Gansey/Adam/Blue/Ronan/Noah OT5) I am deceased, this fic has slain me. It’s a canon-divergence AU where Gansey never died of a bee sting on the ley line, never had any sense knocked into him, attends Aglionby as captain of the crew team, lives his whole life astride the world, has never spoken more than five words to Adam or Ronan. Then it all comes crashing down. In his darkest hour—when Gansey is living in his car yes it’s his beloved Camaro—he is befriended by Adam and Noah. Blue comes later. Ronan doesn’t really figure until the midway point. This fic is SO GOOD. I do not have adequate words to tell you guys how good. This is the ot5 we deserve, and Maggie was a coward for not giving it to us. I do think the fic is strongest on the Gansey-Adam leg of the ot5 (it apparently started out as A Little Princess AU so like, no surprise there). Adam is so underrated and underappreciated—by canon and by fandom both—and I am jubilant to see him get his due here. I also think Gansey is a significantly better person in this fic than he is in canon??? These are Gansey quotes: “You don’t know me at all if you think I would rather chase Glendower than keep all of you safe.” “I have my money back. Fine. But I don’t want to be the person I was before I met you. I don’t want to be without you. Without all of you I would be nothing but a guy with too many things.” I really cannot endorse this fic enough, it’s got Maggie’s narrative voice down pat—it’s even got minor characters like Kavinsky and Piper’s voices—and the humor is on point (Noah: “Like twenty-five percent of my Aglionby friendships killed me”). The plot sort of meanders around for 150k+ words but since when did Maggie care about plot.

Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth (2020) (Locked Tomb #2) If Gideon the Ninth made me love Taz Muir, Harrow the Ninth made me awestruck at her writing chops. This book is a tour de force and also, as

cafemassolit pointed out, the very last thing you’d expect after the unserious goth snark of Gideon the Ninth. Impossible to discuss without MAD SPOILERS so: A meditation on grief. Not just Harrow’s grief, but every Lyctor’s grief for every dead cavalier. Everything about Lyctorhood comes back to the necromancer-cavalier bond, which is a setup so fertile for AU fusions I pray to god we see them the way we see, say, Pacific Rim fusions or daemon AUs. It’s so on-brand that Harrow performed experimental brain surgery on herself not because she loved or missed Gideon (which she did) but because nobody tells Harrowhark Nonagesimus what to do, and she flat-out refuses to be beholden to anyone. Since Abigail and Magnus are a functional version of Harrow and Gideon, it makes sense that Abigail is a much bigger presence in this book, the way Magnus loomed bigger in book 1. Of course Palamedes and Camilla are a functional version of Issac and Jeannemary, and it was lovely to be reunited with them (the coffeeshop AU!! the hug—when Palamedes went to hug amnesiac!Harrow I screamed out loud). My private conviction is that the next book, Alecto the Ninth, will be the romance novel that Palamedes has been scribbling on wallpaper. I mean, at the rate Muir is going would anyone be surprised?

Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth (2019) (Locked Tomb #1) (reread) It’s rare that a reread is better than the first read-through but now that I’m not struggling to identify secondary characters and I know what’s coming this book is twice as rewarding. I love Gideon sfm she’s so decent.

Cat Sebastian, Two Rogues Make a Right (2019) (#2) mlm childhood BFFs to lovers!!!! Cat Sebastian, a woman after my own heart.

Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood (2019) “Fay, an you ever loved me…” What an arrow of a novella. Unerringly drove its iron broadhead tip directly into my heart. People talk about how the forest-ness or the fae-bargain-ness was well done, or how gruff Tobias is such an endearing POV, or Henry’s mom is #lifegoals, and it’s all true but that line is the beating heart of this story for me.

Stephen King, “The Road Virus Heads North” (1999) Why I thought it would be a good idea to read a horror story about a cursed painting that’s impossible to destroy (much like the One Ring), that follows its victim from Boston to Maine, while I was driving up to Maine for the weekend, I have no effing clue.

France Hardinge, Deeplight (2020) “We are all squeezed into new shapes by the people around us.” “You like saving terrible people, don’t you?” “That was the problem with working out what made people tick; sometimes you were left understanding them and not wanting them to die.” This is the first male protagonist of Hardinge’s I’ve read, and as I said to hamsterwoman in the sync-read thread, she tends to pit these wily adolescent protagonists against systems that are corrupt or broken in some way, and the protag has more resources than they think they do, and the engine that drives the plot is the mystery of how the system is failing people. Deeplight fits right into that mold. My overall takeaway was I identified hella strongly with our eel of a hero, Hark, and much less strongly with the supporting cast than I have in previous Hardinge books: “Eels always have spines. They just bend a lot.”

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (2020) Frivolous party-girl leaves Mexico City, treks out to isolated country estate to check on her newlywed cousin, whose letters have grown sinister. There is a house and it is goddamn creepy, and once you set foot in it good luck ever getting out. The mystery of the house grabs you from the get-go, and it’s a compelling enough mystery that it made me overlook some of my problems with Moreno-Garcia’s prose (I mostly just felt like the dialogue was in a weird register). There is body horror. So much body horror. This whole house is a cancer. What I like about Noemí as a protagonist is that the very qualities that she’s constantly being dissed for—her frivolity, her lack of tact, her pigheaded stubbornness, her chainsmoking—are what enable her to escape. And she doesn’t just escape, she rescues others as well. I don’t think I was able to breathe until I read the final line.

Neal Shusterman, Scythe (2016) (Arc of a Scythe #1) Well I can’t fault this YA dystopia (utopia?) for clarity—the writing’s astoundingly clear. What it lacks is depth. Two centuries after science has defeated mortality, there is a special class of people, scythes, whose job is to cull humanity of its excess population. God the worldbuilding is so shallow. The story follows two apprentice scythes whose romance is so clumsy; this is definitely a situation where a friendship would have been more emotionally impactful than a romance. The pacing was almost cinematic in its clarity—i could without much trouble plot the ups and downs on an XY axis. I kept waiting to get bored and stop reading and I never did, I just kept turning pages and now I’m halfway through the second book in the series sooooo joke’s on me lol. I could go on about how clumsy and amateur aspects of the book were but here’s the truth: It’s greater than the sum of its parts. Is it a book that does a bunch of things with virtuoso impressivity? Nope. Does it do well the one thing it sets out to do? Absolutely.

Holly Black, Red Glove (2011) (Curseworkers #2) Local squib boy Cassel Sharpe comes into his magical powers and finds himself wedged between a rock (the FBI) and a hard place (the mafia his girlfriend is in line to inherit). This was a super fun read but I don’t think the romance was well integrated into the plot (who killed Cassel’s brother Phillip?) or the theme (at one point Cassel and his muggle friends attend a nonviolent protest for curseworker rights and get arrested lol). Cassel’s entire family, minus his grandpa, continues to be toxic af—I just wanna give this kid a hug. Overall I thought Book 1 was stellar and this was just plain old good.

Jane Barry, A Time in the Sun (1962) I thought it was going to be about a white girl kidnapped by Apaches who goes native. Given the publication date I was prepared for hella racism. The good news is this book is a lot less racist than I expected! The bad news is the main POV character is a veteran of—and remains heavily invested in—the Lost Cause of the Confederacy which is, uh, not examined at all. Why in blazes did you pick up this book, Lya, I can hear you all asking. Well I was browsing a used bookstore and it had a pretty cover. Jane Barry is not a writer I’ve ever heard of, but she is an incredibly assured writer who never puts a foot wrong in her evocation of time and place (mid-19th century Arizona territory). My beef with her is she seems to be interested in the homosocial relationships between men to the exclusion of other kinds of relationships??? Look here lady if I wanted to go on a historical jaunt with a bunch of bros I’d just reread Lord of the Rings. The kidnapped girl who kicks off the whole plot is almost an afterthought. There is an elegiac quality to the narrative that strikes me as quintessentially Western: It’s about a vanishing frontier and a disappearing way of life. Which makes me mad because indigenous people still, you know, exist in this day and age. Otoh the book makes no bones about the reason the frontier is vanishing—it’s because white men stole a bunch of Indians’ land and massacred them. No, #notallwhitemen but the Apache aren’t gonna trust any white men after this. The end of this book features an actual live onscreen massacre accompanied by Major Character Death, so you know, pretty heavy stuff. Masterfully written but fucking brutal book.

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.”

Zen Cho, “The House of Aunts” AAAAAAAhh I now have #auntgoals. The tone is a departure from Sorcerer to the Crown, which was Cho doing Regency pastiche. This is raw unfiltered Cho and she does that really impressive thing where the dialogue is liberally sprinkled with a language(s) I have zero familiarity with (Malay, Hokkien) and she makes it both authentic and legible to me, an English speaker? Well done and funny af to boot.

Joan Wolf, His Lordship’s Desire (1996) It is unclear to me if Joan Wolf is writing romances or horse-management manuals, but either way my id is very gratified by the prolific quantity of her output. Is she a one-note writer? Yes. Does that one note (childhood-bffs-to-lovers) happen to float my particular boat? Also yes.

asoiaf | Traveling Far by astolat (23k) Jaime and Brienne leave Riverrun and take a detour. Instead of being captured by Bloody Mummers they rescue Arya from the Hound and go to live on Tarth, farm sheep, have babies, and raise Arya + Sansa (whom they collected from KL). The final 10% is Tyrion outsider POV and I have literally never enjoyed a Tyrion POV as much as this. All-around effervescently soft story. I throw a lot of shade at show-first fans but I will give them this: Book!Tywin fucking exhausts me; show!Tywin could, conceivably, be the patriarch of a semi-functional family. Can I just get on my Arya Stark stan soapbox and protest that Nymeria is not Sansa’s direwolf and Arya offering to share her with Sansa is ….somewhat problematic? Also if we need 7 people to witness a wedding are you really going to recruit Arya to stand in for the Stranger??? This version of Arya has never even trained as an assassin wtf. Idk why I am griping about a fic that I enjoyed so much, pay no attention, ilu astolat plz continue to bless us with the content.

star wars | In My Ten Years by brittlelimbs (20k, unfinished, Reylo soulbond AU) It’s an outsider POV—Luke raises Ben, who has a soulbond with orphan baby Rey—and something about the viscerality of the language was zomg hyper poetic.

Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) | tr. from the French There should be a law against the quantity of wigs one is permitted to snatch per line of dialogue. Which is to say, this play is a veritable compendium of sick burns (my favorite: “this production is so bad we’re gonna refund everyone’s tickets”). The main character, Cyrano, is sharp of wit and a master of both wordplay and swordplay. He’s got a tragically, comically big nose which prevents him declaring himself to the object of his affections; instead he undertakes to woo her on behalf of a comrade, by writing love letters. The lady unknowingly falls in love with him through the letters. This book was recommended to me as tragedy masquerading as a comedy, and that it is. That it most assuredly is. Every time the pastry-chef-slash-groom came onscreen I was giggling uncontrollably. It was a bit slow to start but from about 70% onwards the tension was unbearable.

Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derholm (1998) Syncread with

cafemassolit here. This was advertised to me as tourism=colonialism and “let’s takedown fairyland capitalism,” which is true as far as it goes and y’all know I’m always down to dismantle capitalism. But! I am still recovering from the shock that Diana Wynne Jones has it in her to write a functional family. Wizard Derk and his half-human, half-critter brood live in a universe that is being ruthlessly plumbed for resources (just how ruthlessly will take your breath away) and turned into a theme park by a bloodless ghoul of a capitalist from our world. This is, as all DWJ’s books are, an uproarious and sharply observed story, but it’s a less cohesive and more patchwork than I’m used to—she’s always chaotic but she usually ties it together with a bow at the end, and I felt there were more haphazard pieces sticking out than is her wont. Thoroughly enjoyed it however! The part that I enjoyed most was in fact not the anticapitalist sentiment (of which there is plenty, rejoice) but the commentary on parenting? Like, Derk and Mara are not perfect parents but they are 100% committed and present parents, which we don’t get a lot of in fantasy. Their failures offer an opening to my favorite character, the grumpy mentor-dragon, to step into the gap.

Claudia Gray, Lost Stars (2015) (Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens #1) What if Romeo and Juliet were best friends and also ace pilots at the Imperial Academy in the years before the first Death Star was built? Hello friends and welcome to my keyboardsmashing review of a book that I will proceed to quote EXTENSIVELY, more because it hit all my buttons than because it’s an earth-shatteringly original story. It is for sure a testament to how well my friends know me that

azdaema came to me bearing this rec—thank you, it was exactly my speed—and that as soon as I told

witcherology I was reading a Star Wars book she knew instantly which one I meant—because my Brand is evidently that strong. I mean, childhood bffs!!!! Fighting on opposite sides of a war!!! Lost Stars is a competently executed novel but not in any way a transcendent one—it’s a seaworthy vessel, it’s just that if you’re not interested in the destination there’s no sights or fancy amenities to make it worth your while. I feel obliged to warn that we’re denied a happy ending, because it has been borne upon me that this is a thing folks care about; for myself I only care that they recognize each other as the most important person in their lives. It ends on a cliffhanger because…they want us to buy the next book in the series, ig.

Thane and Ciena are two kids from clashing cultural backgrounds (in crude terms, he’s a city boy and she’s a valley girl; they grow up on a backwater planet) with radically divergent moral philosophies (this becomes particularly glaring in the arena of oaths and loyalty: what does one owe to people/institutions who do not keep faith with you?). Thane is a cynic and Ciena an idealist; Thane is inclined toward chaos, Ciena toward order. Thane defects to the Rebellion and Ciena rises high in the Imperial ranks. Thane is obviously right and Ciena is wrong. The conversations between them are handled with more nuance than that, of course, but the problem isn’t that Ciena doesn’t have perfectly comprehensible motivations: It’s that the secondary cast, and the entire weight of the narrative momentum, is busy proving Thane right and Ciena wrong. Which makes the romance ultimately less interesting and less urgent because it’s just an impossibly tall order for me as a reader to identify with fascists, sorry! Anyway here are some tropes that made me swoon:

Co-piloting as a metaphor for a lifelong partnership? Never ever gets old. They have their own secret hideyhole/batcave!!! Omg it’s Field Day and they run the pilot equivalent of a three-legged race—and smoke the competition. The post-pubescent “he’s handsome/she’s beautiful” revelations also never get old. Faithfully adopting the mourning rituals of your beloved, even if there is a large cultural chasm between them and you!!! He guesses her password on the first try!!

“(Thane’s older brother) had said there was only one reason to pick up some girl from the valleys—and if that was what Than was after, he ought to get one who had breasts already. Than had split Dalton’s lip before their parents pulled them apart.” “Taught him that it didn’t matter who was really right or wrong—because the rules were set by whoever held the cane.” “Ciena Ree’s one of the best pilots here. You could’ve gone to twenty different worlds and never found anyone better to fly with.” “Sometimes even looking at her hurt—No. It irritated him. Angered him. It didn’t hurt.”

“You think everything the academy and the Empire does is perfect!” “And you think every authority figure is evil like your father!”

“It’s not whether he’s my friend or someone I love. He’s both. Thane’s always been both, since the beginning.” “But it hadn’t changed. That was the amazing thing. They’d always belonged to each other in ways that were difficult to define; Thane felt as thought they’d simply acknowledged what had been true from the start.” —>MY SOUL HAS STRAIGHT-UP ASCENDED TO ANOTHER PLANE

“But it wasn’t against regulations to love what she did—or to remember what she had lost.” “You don’t have the right to risk lives you’re responsible for to save those you aren’t.” “Th excellence of her service had long since ceased to be only a matter of honoring her oath. She also thought of it as the price she paid for giving Thane his freedom. No one would ever be able to say she hadn’t paid in full.” “…not because he believed the Rebellion was pure good but because he’d learned the Empire was pure evil.” “Always Ciena. Did Thane possess a memory worth having that she wasn’t a part of?” “And I don’t want other people to die because I’m afraid of hurting this one person in the entire Imperial Starlet that I love.” “He didn’t love the Rebellion more than he loved Ciena. But he could be willing to die for only one of those things.” “Before they were ten years old, they’d known when to let each other remain silent, how to be close to each other without intruding. How many people ever understood someone that well?” “Nobody ever knows the whole truth. That’s why promises mean something. Otherwise they’d be too easy.” “Just for the record, Kyrell? The galaxy is full of women who don’t fight for the enemy.” “It was his own business if he crossed the galaxy, or broke his heart, or steered his X-Wing straight into the core of a star.” “He knew what Ciena would do as surely as if he’d come up with the plan himself. ‘She’s going to crash it.’” “All I ever asked, in all those battles, was not to be the one who killed you.” “But she thought she would always know him, by his step or his flight or his eyes. Some about his eyes never changed.” “Because the deck is always stacked, Ciena. All we can do is stack it in our favor.”

“You would, if it were me inside that cell.” “…yes. I would.”

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 but witcherology 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.”

boilerplate disclaimer: these are not fic recs. i enjoyed them, but if i was reccing fic recs i’d have more of a care for what other people need/want. these are just words that became pixels because i had feelings.

[hp] The Changeling by Annerb (183k) I love Slytherin!Ginny with my WHOLE HEART. It’s a Ginny Weasley character study—it’s tagged Harry/Ginny and Harry is a major presence in her life but the ship is not really central. The way the author conceptualizes Hogwarts Houses is very much as Secondary Houses, if we’re going by the Sorting Hat Chats taxonomy; your Secondary describes how you do things, not why you do them. Slytherins are ruthlessly pragmatic about getting results using whatever means are at their disposal; over the course of seven years Ginny learns to weaponize other people’s assumptions about her against them. The other students find her fucking terrifying. And she’s a survivor, which is not a label I would apply to Harry, Ron, or Hermione. Listen, when I tell you I love this story I need you to understand Ginny Weasley doesn’t even crack my top 10 HP Characters. I don’t even like her. It’s been so many years since I’ve read the books that I legitimately couldn’t tell you which of the characters in this fic are OCs and which are tertiary canon characters. But this Ginny has an astonishing number of layers. Her family treats her different for being a Slytherin and her housemates ostracize her for being a Weasley. For the first few years Quidditch is the thing that centers her. When Fred and George showed up to her first match as captain of the Slytherin team and one of them was decked out in red/gold and the other in green/silver to support Ginny I swear I started bawling. But there’s so much more to Ginny than being good at Quidditch. The fic is about her discovering the whole of her self and her strange ambitions. It’s about how people are more than what they seem. It’s about how Snape is actually an excellent Occlumency teacher, Harry was just the world’s worst student. It’s about how sometimes you grow up and apart from your friends through no fault of your own. It’s about how Slytherins are capable of trust and sacrifice—they’re just incapable of not calculating the cost. It was SPECTACULAR.

[hp] a life of smoke and silvered glass by dirgewithoutmusic (27k Snape-centric) I do not believe dirgewithoutmusic is capable of constructing a sentence that is not wrought like a gem. It’s not just that the words are pretty, it’s that the feelings slice right through you like a scalpel to the spine. You would think a fic about undercover DeathEater!Snape remaining friends with Lily and repenting that “Mudblood” slur and secretly being christened Harry’s second godfather would be angsty as all get-out but it’s somehow soft??? Snape’s not cuddly or kind, but his canon edges have been softened. Ok I just finished it and I lied, the final 1/5 is wall-to-wall angst. The fact that the most important people in Snape’s life are Lily, James and Harry and yet this fic revised my opinions of Petunia and Dumbledore is some alchemy.

[xmfc] Limited Release by rageprufrock (20k, Erik/Charles but plenty of outsider pov) Man, if I ever want to write a story about (1) FBI field agents or (2) how journalism works I would probably just reread this fic instead of, idk, a book? It’s way more fun than a factual account would be, and the research is woven into every molecule of the story. I realize the research isn’t why most people come to rageprufrock, it’s the humor, but the hallmark of her humor is the specificity of it. Her jokes are my jokes because they’re fandom in-jokes, idk how else to explain it. As always I am floored by the way she chooses words like a surgeon selects scalpels. What I noticed is how there isn’t a lot of tension driving the plot. There is a plot—the plot exists—it just doesn’t pull me along on a string. It has occurred to me that I’m reading xmfc fic in the Year of Our Lord 2020 primarily for craft-related reasons, to study the writing, not for squee reasons. It’s a big enough fandom that there’s an embarrassment of good content; it’s not such a large fandom that the top-hits-by-kudos are all garbage. I like it enough to consume the content; I don’t like it so much my emotions overwhelm my analysis. Anyway rageprufrock is a national treasure.

[xmfc] Some Such Place (The Big Screen Classics Remix) by pocky slash (17k, Erik/Charles, no beach divorce AU) Y’all know my shipping priors right? I’m way more interested in two people’s dawning realization that ohshit they’re in love than a recounting of the sequence of events by which they fell in love. This fic was therefore tailored to my tastes. It’s an “oh no we’ve been fuckbuddies for a year now we gotta define our relationship???” story where Erik goes to classic film screenings not because he particularly cares for any of the movies, but in order to spend time with Charles. When these two had a fight because “we’re not friends” because the word doesn’t encompass everything they are to each other that’s my fucking kryptonite that’s the GOOD SHIT right there. I’m no film buff myself, and neither is Erik, and somehow we both ended up learning a lot. The way Erik/Charles’s relationship was embedded in the most hot-button social issue of the day (mutant school integration) was …. wow.

[leverage] All the Way Back Where I Come From by romanticgirl (71k, OT3, soulmark AU) Eliot is born with two soulmarks, one that matches Parker’s and one that matches Hardison’s. Parker and Hardison start dating, just as they do in canon (though they do not themselves have matching soulmarks). Everything happens exactly as it does in canon, only with additional soulmark complications. This kind of interstitial storytelling is not usually my jam. Actually soulmarks are not my jam, and the workmanlike prose is not my jam, and yet I really enjoyed the fic. It’s not doing anything groundbreaking—it’s Eliot POV, Eliot is the most popular and written-about character in the fandom, Eliot is usually depicted as the most reluctant to commit to the ot3. It’s just so good at looking at the boundaries we draw and the boxes we put people in, coworkers vs. friends vs. lovers, and how the ot3 is all of these.

[leverage] What a Beast is Mankind by ladyragnell (1k, OT3, daemon AU) This is no word of a lie the softest thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. Softer than ice cream, softer than the scarf my grandma knit for me. When Eliot said “Maybe I'd like to touch you first, Parker, you ever think of that?” I could hear his gravelly voice and exasperated delivery. Hardison’s daemon is a big fat cat and I love it bc Eliot and Parker both have funky stuff going on with their daemons since Parker’s neurodivergent and Eliot’s got more PTSD than some nation-states do, but Hardison is just. A cat!!!

[mcu] lord send me a mechanic if i’m not beyond repair by suzukiblu (4k, Sam Wilson/Bucky Barnes, daemon AU) I was chortling from the first word to the last. The main insights I gleaned from this fic were not even about the central pairing, they were about Steve and Natasha. “Sam’s not usually prone to much romanticized violence in his metaphors, but Natasha seems to bring it out in people” and “anything Natasha says neutrally has something else to it” are both lines that would only work in a fic. This is such a fic-lover’s fic. I love that the premise is Sam doesn’t know Bucky’s daemon’s real name—Bucky just calls him “Sweetheart”—and by the end we don’t find out his name, or how they got severed or anything, he just rests his muzzle on Sam’s lap and it’s PERFECTION. Honestly I think people who write daemon AUs spend way too much time writing about severing and its consequences, so me not being subjected to more of that unpleasantness was a relief.

[mcu] The Scottish Boy by BetteNoire (130k, Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes, medieval AU) Worth the price of admission just for the glorious footnotes. I feel like I just read a goddamn dissertation on the Hundred Years’ War. At first I was iffy about this fic because Steve is an English knight and Bucky is his feral Scottish prisoner/squire and is it even Stucky if they’re enemies-to-lovers? However I happened to rewatch Captain America: The Winter Soldier about halfway into this fic and it reminded me they’re enemies by circumstance, and also how punchable Brock Rumlow’s face is. And there are tournaments. SO MANY tournaments. Instead of being a brainwashed super-assassin Bucky turns into a vengeance-driven super-assassin, a cross between the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Count of Monte Cristo. Tony Stark was perfectly cast as the Earl of Arundel. What I love about Steve and Bucky’s story is the epic sweep of it, and the all-encompassing nature of it, and this AU setting perfectly captured both. Sadly this fic was taken down but I saved a copy.

[asoiaf] The Lady of Casterly Rock by justadram (7k, Jaime Lannister/Sansa Stark arranged marriage AU) A jewel of a story omg it’s so restrained and literally nothing happens except Jaime catches feelings for his wife!! That’s it!! He doesn’t even kiss her. One thousand chef’s kisses would not be enough for this fic.

[asoiaf] In This Light by SigilBroken (90k) The ultimate Jaime x Brienne story. It’s a Battle for the Dawn futurefic and it had me glued to my screen for 2 hours. This story fucking slew me. The author is clearly a Brienne fan first and foremost, and I think that makes for a more nuanced shipfic (I’m speaking as Jaime’s #1 fan over here). I can get over the cardboard-cutout-villain Dany and the one-dimensional Arya because she just has such a stellar grasp of Brienne and Jaime’s characters (Cersei is two-dimensional, I’d say—that’s the minimum you need for a good Braime fic). The Tyrion-Jaime dynamic slapped. There are very few canons I know like the back of my hand the way I know ASOIAF, so I tend to be unwarrantedly harsh on fanworks, but every single detail of this was 100% on point (including Gendry being monosyllabic with everyone except Arya). I have been meaning to read this story for like five years and it ripped my heart out but when the humor hits it hits. And there are some lines that pierced my soul to the extent I had to copy them down and repeat them like prayer beads.

[asoiaf] Something that ought to have lain there unnoticed by SecondStarOnTheLeft (23k, Sansa-centric daemon AU) You know when you click on a fic and don’t read the tags and then you’re too lazy to scroll up? I legit didn’t know if this was Joffrey/Sansa, Petry/Sansa, Jon/Sansa, or Tyrion/Sansa, all of which I thought it was at various points. Well it’s Willas/Sansa, and good for her—Highgarden seems like a place where she can heal. Boy howdy does having a daemon magnify her trauma x500. I’m not sure if Petyr raped her or if he just touched her daemon without permission? Maybe it amounts to the same thing. I was admittedly miffed when Jon called Sansa “little sister” I was like HOLD UP JUST ONE SECOND nobody in this fic spares a single thought for where Arya is or what she’s doing. I enjoyed it though, I don't want to misrepresent it as 100% trauma, I was going awww for a good 50% of it.

[mdzs] The Grand Master of Daemonic Cultivation by FayJay (4k, daemon AU) I don’t even go here. I don’t even know who half these characters are. I do not understand how it had the power to hurt me. It’s WWX-pov and he is the Gryffindorest Gryffindor to ever Gryffindor. Lmao can you tell I was writing a daemon AU last week and reading a bunch for research.

D.B. Jackson, Thieftaker (2011) (Thieftaker #1) A private investigator in a pre-revolutionary noir Boston gets beat up by thugs—like really, graphically gets the shit beat out of him on multiple occasions and he’s also a sort of blood mage into the bargain so he’s constantly cutting himself open to power his (totally illegal!) magic. It’s historical fantasy and it somehow makes me wish for both less history and less fantasy?? How is that possible? I’m ok with magecraft being stigmatized and associated with the Salem Witch Trials, but the concept of using Latin to cast spells is so vanilla, and then he goes and gives you a verbatim English translation which takes the oomph right out of it. I don’t want to give the impression the book wasn’t gripping because it was, and I like Ethan quite a lot, but the actual plot when you examine it would not have stood up to a stiff breeze. Ethan’s emotional arc was resolved but the plot was a shambles. Bruh you are writing a m y s t e r y. Step up your game.

Erin Claiborne, A Hero at the End of the World (2014) This is what Carry On could have been had it been written by someone who was a participant in fandom rather than a lurker on the outskirts of it (which is what Rainbow Rowell was). Erin Claiborne has somehow written a coffeeshop AU where the stakes are saving-the-world high, which sounds like a contradiction in terms but isn’t. Erin Claiborne is eleveninches, one of the co-authors of the mind-bogglingly-meta Steve Rogers at 100: Celebrating Captain American on Film fic, among others. A Hero at the End of the World is paced like fanfic, not like profic (there’s an amnesia trope and a spot of random alternate-universe-hopping), and while it wasn’t exactly the story of my heart it was a delight from start to finish (which is more than I can say about Carry On which I found emotionally impenetrable). I would describe it as following Ron Weasley’s post-Hogwarts career as an Auror, I guess? After he slew Voldemort and this opened an irreparable breach between him and Harry, who now works as a barista. Written by someone who has a much better grasp of Harry’s character than of Ron’s, I would judge. I wouldn’t say Claiborne is a writer who gets me, since there is a notable lack of obsessive pining in this light fluffy cream puff of a story, but her banter is without peer. Standouts include “You pay taxes?” “Of course I don’t pay taxes, I’m rich” and when the Draco-analogue sputters in disbelief, “You were going to send my mother to Mount Unpleasant like a common criminal?” Lmao he’s less upset they’re sending Lucius to Azkaban than that Azkaban is the prison of the proletariat. Really brings the class analysis that was missing from HP (to be fair Carry On did not lack for the class lens either). Plus there is a surprising quantity of theory baked into the worldbuilding, which is neat because HP’s magic has always struck me as very logical and orderly on a micro level but on a macro level none of that shit makes any sense.

Cat Rambo, “Red in Tooth and Cog” Protagonist becomes a reluctant caretaker at a nature preserve for feral appliances. What a well-executed story! “There are no shelters for abandoned machines. We are reprocessed. Recycled. Reborn, perhaps. Probably not.”

Sam J. Miller, “Calved” “He wasn’t having a good time. When he was twelve he had begged me to bring him. I had pretended to like it, back then for his sake. Now he pretended for mine. We were both acting out what we thought the other wanted, and that thought should have troubled me. But that’s how it had been with my dad. That’s what I thought being a man meant.” Succeeds in being both a damning indictment of toxic masculinity and an ode to fatherhood. Actually, it does one by doing the other. I don’t think the climate change stuff was integrated as well as it could’ve been but still an extremely moving story.

Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders (2017) (Terra Ignota #2) I have read the Iliad TWICE because two different professors assigned it and I’ve never understood why it was a cornerstone of Western art until now. It definitely helped that Ada Palmer’s version was a Pacific Rim fusion AU that took place on the moon with jaeger pilots. This book was two-thirds setup and the final third packed more fireworks than all of China on Lunar New Year. I mean, there are plenty of books that are constructed like puzzle-boxes, and you have that eureka moment when all the clues slot into place, but those revelations are confined to the pages of those books. Ada Palmer’s gift is shucking you like a corn husk and showing the inside of your own brain to you. I’m not saying I was less dazed by her virtuosity in this second book than in Too Like the Lightning, and I’m aware they’re supposed to be one continuous story, but at least I was prepared for it this time—the first time it happened I just about lost consciousness.

If I had to summarize Seven Surrenders in one sentence I’d say it’s a conversation about how to make public policy decisions, how to weigh short-term vs long-term considerations (the more accurate but less useful summary would be the exploding-head emoji). How does every one of these fictional world leaders protesting “We didn’t create this system we just inherited it” still manage to show more accountability than any of our real-world political leaders in this convulsive and epochal moment lol. Does complacency stifle innovation—not in the trite “we’re a venture-capital-funded tech startup look at us Innovate” sense, but in the real sense? Is there nobility in the vocation of being a soldier, even if there is only savagery in war itself? How does Ada Palmer gild mundane events in baroque language but make a routine recitation of hereditary titles sound deranged and pathetic?

A non-exhaustive list of things that hurt me or amused me: The metaphorical resonance of Mycroft’s cyborg heart!! That every Hive has their pet name for Jehovah and Utopia’s is “The Alien.” The way Papadelias caught Saladin’s scent because Mycroft slipped up and used the same trick twice. When they’re all gathered at the G7 brothel to hear the results of the paternity test like it’s a tabloid talk show and Faust snorts, “I don’t think much can be done to keep me from being the child’s uncle” (I wouldn’t say I’ve come around to liking Felix Faust but his brain fascinates me). Whoah I did not expect the Mitsubishi to be the only Hive to go down fighting (their whole one-share-one-vote plutocracy rubbed me the wrong way for obvious I’m-a-socialist reasons). When the Utopians offer Madame their conditions for surrender and Madame fishes for information and Mushi stonewalls her with “Ma’am this is a negotiation, I will only share relevant info” that was great (I wonder if it’s Mycroft’s partiality that colors my sympathies here—he admits his bias against Thisbe but I haven’t noticed him admitting the same of Madame—either way I hate Madame and everything she stands for—I don’t hate the 18th century I just can’t relate to how she wants to build an atom bomb merely to prove she can???). I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that anarchist!Saladin is now Madame’s dog but it did surprise me that Mycroft didn’t take it as a betrayal?

Before I started Seven Surrenders the name Apollo Mojave would have rung a dim bell but now, now I see he’s the absence this book is built around. The scene where Cornel Mason tracks the truant Mycroft to Apollo’s statue and they mourn him together is so powerful (the Martian ants!!!). So, let’s talk about Mycroft’s murder trial. I get why we only see this fourteen-years-past trial now, with the weight of the first book’s events to drive it home, and it is impeccably done. All the big set-pieces are impeccably executed, Sniper outing the G7 brothel on live TV, Jehovah’s assassination on the steps of the Senate building. Even the buildup of tension to Carlyle’s first “sensayer session” with Dominic was like nothing I saw in book 1. But back to Mycroft, who murdered Apollo (or challenged him to single combat and prevailed?). It broke his heart to do it. He didn’t expect to be exonerated or celebrated for it, he just expected it to work, and Providence denied him even that. The fates are cruel. I love that Apollo was the brightest star in the Utopian filament not because he was the smartest, but because he was a skilled communicator who could translate their ideas into concepts the other Hives could understand. I think my pro-Utopia bias is showing, and it hasn’t abated, despite learning they’re just as “dirty” as the other Hives. I’m pretty proud of myself: The only time I cried reading this book was when Mycroft confessed he wasn’t finishing Apollo’s Iliad, he was writing this account instead, because this--not Apollo's words but the world he made--was the most fitting monument to his memory. And then Achilles fucking strolls out and I was like ofc!!!! Lieutenant Aimer!!! The fucking Sadcat parable ahhhh how did I not see this coming.

If I wasn't already agnostic Ada Palmer would have barred my path to atheism, not because she's changed my mind about God but because she's changed my mind about humanity.

“There is something a little good in war. Trial by combat.” “It is not strange for the deaths of saints to be accompanied by miracles.” “They saved the world.” “Made the world, more like. Two thousand, two hundred and four deaths buy one golden age.” “I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world.” “We would hardly work so hard for our utopias if we let ourselves live in the illusion that they are already real.” “I did not plan this. I simply resurrected the weapons with which it was done.” “There has to be an Outsider or the next strangest will be named Outsider.” “She is an unexpected threat, outside the palette of the possible, as when a fortress city, whose death-stained towers have stopped a hundred battle lines, is brought low by a pestilence within.” “Snakes sleep most of their lives, you know—they stir only to feed.” “A kind God would have left us Bridger. A cruel One would have left us nothing. This One left you. You know how to fight this war, Achilles.” “When Utopians forge Earth’s rare metals into dragon fleets that feed on sunlight as they bear their masters across the sky-white surface of the Moon, they are wizards, even if they use science to deny it.” “If Fate had set all the treasures of this world before him, the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, the Armor of Achilles, Asclepius’s wand that raises loved ones from Hades’s hall, Papa would have chosen this.” “His Grace is an exile in time, and it is madness to him that his subjects are his by vote, and not by birth or conquest.” “My old self had been so armored in conviction that it had never hesitated. My new, raw self did not yet know to name these icy stab-wounds ‘doubt.’” “I lived in that unique and absolute philosophic calm of one who has already drunk the hemlock, or already sees his heart’s blood streaming from the wound.” “But I gave that up to teach you, gentle reader, what violence the human beast can sow when we are free.” “I didn’t have to destroy you, Cornel. I just turned all of you into 18th century aristocrats and let you do it yourselves.” “Tyrants and assassins have a great symbiosis.” “I need a companion in this world who is neither my subject nor my enemy.” “Think of our perversion as topiary. We all had the seeds in us, but it’s Madame who made them art.” “I should have but to Will a thing for it to be, yet here I was reduced to these weak tools: hands, eyes, memory. Beyond these limits I would be forever powerless … I have learned, I think, to eke out more from what this flesh can do than any human, but no finite thing can substitute for lost infinity.” “I was not Apollo’s pupil, nor his killer; Cornel was not the avenger nor the unrequited lover; we were just two people who had lost the same friend.” “Oh, miraculous chameleon, Science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith!” “As if it were not cruelty enough that change in time cannot create without destroying, once again He makes the agent He sends to bring about His better world love this one.” “The Utopians fuel their Spaceships with whatever they can mine from the Space Rocks they’ve already reached, and the Resources on those Space Rocks limit how much further they can go. You’re the only Outpost left on my Frontier with enough Resources to let me go further.” “And thanks to Madame’s training, Dominic believes a man may only love something weaker than himself.” “Bash by this definition is not just a group of people, but that special group of people with whom one can communicate completely.” “Nor would you speak with ease if you saw the better part of your heart severed on a table before you. It was the better part, not the clumsy meat pump biology had fit me with, but love’s creation, mine and Saladin’s, which Saladin planted to mark his territory, so every clock tick that measured my life’s hours was his as much as mine.” “Diogenes with his barrel and his sunlight lived every hour of his life content, while Alexander fought and bled, mourned friends, faced enemies, and died unsatisfied.” “Don’t let the living stay mortal and the dead stay dead because of me. Apollo, Seine Mardi, older heroes, Patriarch Voltaire, Diogenes, Odysseus, MASON who will die someday, Papa, good Spain, my Saladin, and every victim of the coming war, they all could walk the Earth another hundred years, five hundred, live to walk on Mars, on Titan, on the ship decks wrought of substances undreamt-of which will someday bear us to the Sea of Stars. If there are still colors in grief’s palette that I—orphan, parricide, traitor, wanderer, fool—have not yet had wrung out of my flesh, then let me suffer them, not all the world."

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.

Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline (2019) For a book whose thesis is “abolish men” this turned out less angry and more introspective than I expected. I came for the time travel and stayed for the non-time-traveling POV, Beth, who spends her entire arc in 1992. This is weird because I’m aggressively uninterested in the early nineties punk rock scene, which is >50% of Beth’s story. Beth’s world felt real and lived-in; Tess’s felt plot-driven. Tess’s mission: prevent a shadowy conspiracy of incels from plunging us into the Darkest Timeline. Bit by bit it dawns on us that Tess’s present is already perilously close to that timeline—in Tess’s 2022, abortion is illegal in all 50 states. And yet there are time travelers who remember a country where abortion was legal. We’re told that making big “edits” to history causes psychological distress in travelers, who have to reconcile two conflicting sets of memories. Newitz does this neat trick where she replicates the travelers’ disorientation on the reader; she has you nodding along because of course Harriet Tubman was elected senator and of course we got universal suffrage in 1870. I had to google “women’s suffrage USA” to confirm my hunch that on the federal level women didn’t get the vote until 1920. But that’s intentional. Nobody who’s not a subject matter expert (or researching a novel) has the relevant dates & facts at their fingertips. Our internal timelines for “which events happened when” are fuzzy and vulnerable to suggestion/manipulation. This is an apt metaphor for abuse victims who are gaslit by their abusers, as Beth is gaslit by her father. The way he kept changing the rules on her so she had to scramble to anticipate every fluctuation in his mood? That was ghastly. It’s no wonder Beth found escape through punk rock, which is an explicitly political genre. But doesn’t all music help you retain thoughts & feelings you might only have intermittent access to? Music is a medium in which “cognitive and emotional are less divided.” Thus, punk rock inculcated defiance in Beth and Tess both, under a system where defiance ought never have been possible. I devoured this book in one sitting. I look back at The Handmaid’s Tale and The Female Man which are also set in near-future dystopias and also about reproductive rights and I wonder if Newitz’s book will age as well as those two.

Daphne Du Maurer, Frenchman’s Creek (1941) If you thought this was going to be a sexy romp where a very bored, very married aristocrat has an affair with a swashbuckling pirate then you don’t know Du Maurier. If you do know Du Maurier you’d assume she’s congenitally incapable of writing a book that’s not a stealth-paean to the Cornish countryside, AND YOU WOULD BE CORRECT. Dona St. Columb is a fugitive from her own life. She’s run away from London to rusticate in Cornwall. She’s a bad wife, a bad mother, a bad neighbor, and (most damning as far as I’m concerned) a bad employer to her servants. Even when she’s surrounded by pompous douchecanoes I found it hard to sympathize with her, which means, probably, I’m not meant to. What this book does really well is examine the difference between hunger for diversion/stimulation and hunger to achieve/accomplish. Initially Dona can’t tell the difference because she’s been entombed in a life that asks her to abdicate her sense of self, and she’ll take anything at this point. Any escape hatch. The worst part about Dona’s entourage of male admirers isn’t that they pressure her for sexual favors; the worst part is they demand her attention and energy and they’re livid when she mentally peaces out because she’d rather daydream about piratical hijinks than listen to these useless men drone on. Utterly relatable. I think this is a technically accomplished book but not one that resonated with me. Du Maurier can do better, and my campaign to make everyone acknowledge My Cousin Rachel as the zenith of Du Maurier’s work proceeds apace!

Steven Burst, Taltos (1988) (Vlad Taltos #4) “Why did Morrolan have walls around a castle that floated?” For the #aesthetic, Vlad, jeez. Teckla was a heavy book and it was so nice to have Vlad back to his breezy self, here at the start of his journey. What makes this book work is the flashbacks, which are interspliced with surgical precision between the stitches of the present-day narrative thread. In the present, this is a “how I met my Dragonlord buddies” origin story. In the past, it’s a “how I became an assassin” origin story. These are both facts I already knew about Vlad—that he’s an assassin, and that he has Dragonlord buddies who would die for him—but it’s the how that matters. I was legit tearing up at the end of every flashback, particularly if Vlad’s grandpa appeared, and when Loiash switched from calling him “Mama” to “Boss” I may have shed extra tears for how large the House of Jhereg’s mercenary values loomed in the poor kid’s life. If Vlad can never be a “real” Dragaeran and his atypical upbringing precludes him belonging wholly to the category of “Easterner,” then what does that leave except “assassin”? That’s one identity he chose for himself. Of course in the present-day it’s a running gag which is the more insulting term, “Jhereg” or “Easterner.” Goddamnit this is such a good book. The point at which it definitively blew my mind was when those centaurs commended Vlad on being “a good companion,” and the whole story flipped on its head. This is Morrolan’s quest; Vlad is just the sarcastic sidekick. I thought it was going to take the form of an elaborate heist but then it turns out they’re haring off to the Underworld omg. And the way Vlad saves the day by drawing on what his grandpa taught him!! I was chuffed to see everybody acting EXTREMELY Slytherin primary in the third act (everyone except Sethra, who seems to have prioritized saving Zerika over saving Aliera but that may have been bc she saw the entire Dragaeran Empire as her circle of concern). I think this series does its finest work when Burst is wrestling with questions of identity and Taltos is a real standout.

Crossposts: https://tabacoychanel.livejournal.com/45587.html

I actually watched Marriage Story this week and I'm confused about why it's so ~controversial when it's straight-up anti-divorce-lawyer propaganda?? If there is one thing we as a society can agree on it's our hatred of divorce lawyers.

Also watched the Taylor Swift documentary and I gotta say my problem with it was not that it was performative and fake, it was that it was boring and basic and I guess if I wanted to actually learns something about how female artists navigate the shark-infested waters of the music industry I'd just rewatch Nashville lol

don't think i mentioned this on here buti saw Knives Out and it was, as advertised, fucking brilliant. sometimes good movies are good because they activate some emotion or thought process you’d never have imagined on your own; THIS movie though? i wanted an “eat the rich” movie that was also mega hella entertaining and Rian Johnson delivered it to me in SPADES

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944) Historically the market has been subordinate to, or an appendage of, society. Along came the 19th century to upset that applecart. You can’t substitute “pecuniary gain” for “social relationships” as the organizing principle of human activity without causing strife, dislocation, and suffering on a planetary scale—Polanyi calls it a “cataclysm.” Karl Polanyi is a thinker of titanic stature and his ideas have dribbled down to me via so many other thinkers that by the time I encountered the source they were well chewed over. I also think the level of granular detail we got about, say, parliamentary machinations in Prussia was of limited utility to the average lay reader. However, as far as the big picture goes, Polanyi’s work holds up. He’s so prescient that his entire final chapter is “the center cannot hold, it’s either socialism or fascism.” Another way of putting it is that, contra Econ 101, “society” is metaphysically upstream of “the individual.” It’s nonsensical to speak of “the government” meddling in “the market”: There is no market without society. It is because the market is embedded in society that we had to totally overhaul our social relations just so that market values could reign supreme. Sidenote: it’s fascinating that during the apocalyptic (in terms of how it decimated communities) transition to a market-based society you saw a lot of strange bedfellows—for instance, landlords and peasants arrayed against industrialists.

Seanan McGuire, The Unkindest Tide (2019) (October Daye #13) It’s the selkie book! Following on the heels of the Tam Lin book. It’s another Luidaeg-centric one. No lie this book is 35% Luidaeg and I’m digging it bc I relate to her sense of humor. It’s not that I don’t think Seaman McGuire’s funny; but she’s not as funny as she thinks she is, and wow does Quentin get more than his fair share of zingers. This book carries over many of the thematic concerns of the previous book, only with less “healing from trauma” and more “this is a how-not-to-parent manual.” The cruelest line was when tertiary character Liz Ryan spat at Toby, “You’re lucky one of us knows how to be a mother.” I mean OUCH. There’s a moment when Toby registers her own culpability in this clusterfuck—that she’s repeated her own mother’s mistakes by raising her own daughter to expect one set of rules where an entirely different set actually applies. Sometimes I think about that tumblr shitpost about how Frodo had to leave for the Grey Havens bc they don’t have therapists on Middle Earth …but surely they have therapists in San Francisco??? Why don’t Toby, Tybalt et al take advantage of said therapists??? What I liked: that in a world of unequal bargains and unpayable debts volition still matters; that humans understand change less well than the fae because they’re born & die in the same bodies—it’s axiomatic that mortality=change so this role-reversal felt very fresh, and seems to constitute an anti-Cartesian argument for an embodied existence (it’s literally a book about selkies). What I disliked: When the character beats hit in this series, they REALLY hit (I’m still recovering from the Simon book). Otoh everything in between is kind of wobbly. You notice it more in minor books like this precisely because there aren’t as many major beats to anchor it.

Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings (2015) (Dandelion Dynasty #1) Less than the sum of its parts. I’m circulating a petition to make Ken Liu write fairy tale retellings and only fairy tale retellings, who’s with me. The man is so good at this one thing that you wonder why he bothers doing anything else (I jest, I jest; I do not at all wonder that he tried his hand at epic fantasy rather than spend the rest of his life regretting the missed opportunity). It wasn’t that I didn’t get attached to the characters, but they’d get their heads lopped off as soon as I learned their names (or self-immolate in some other messy fashion). In theory I’m receptive to the idea of vignettes featuring one-off POVs building toward a larger story—I have, in fact, read Water Margin which is one of the ur-texts this novel is in conversation with, since it’s about BANDITS and OUTLAWS resisting an empire—but for pete’s sake there needs to be more connective tissue than this. I found our main Guile Hero, Kuni Garu, to be irresistible but by himself he was not up to the task of making the whole book hang together. Ken Liu excels at the kind of cruel reversals and bittersweet triumphs that epitomize fairy tales; even his politicking reads like parables (the antelope/horse episode!!!). But short stories are like carving a miniature figurine of fixed dimensions—you have to fit the story to the container. Novels give you a lot more latitude in designing the shape of the container but the tradeoff is you may suffer decision fatigue from having to make all these CHOICES about what to put in it. I know Ken Liu is aware of this because he’s talked about it in a blog post. Quite a gap between theory and praxis, there. I DNF’d it at 50%, life is too short and this book is too long.

Steven Brust, Teckla (1987) (Vlad Taltos #3) 3 books into a series about internecine elf mafia wars I was not expecting to be crying about a fight I had with my husband; Vlad and Cawti fight the way married people fight. I wasn’t expecting to be singing “Solidarity Forever” either. Teckla is the book where assimilationist Vlad’s revolutionary wife joins an anarchist cell, puts her body in the gears of the machine and Vlad loses half his hair from stress. I kept waiting for Brust to commit to one side or the other—can violent insurrection ever change an oppressive status quo? Does class struggle get the goods or not? Is Cawti right that strength lies in numbers & organizing the masses, or is Vlad right to be apprehensive of a paramilitary crackdown (it is after all what they did to Occupy Wall Street)? I had written Cawti off in the previous books as merely a useful sounding board for Vlad to bounce ideas off (to say Brust has a heavy hand with romance is perhaps to understate the case). Imagine my surprise when in this book she has sincere ideological commitments where Vlad has only a very Slytherin commitment to protecting the people who belong to him. The contrast does Vlad no favors. He was ready to blow up dozens of innocent people to “save” her, until he met Frantz the Ghost (which btw raises interesting worldbuilding questions about reincarnation & souls). This supposed contradiction he touts between putting abstract ideals first and putting actual people first majorly annoyed me until someone (Kelly) finally called Vlad out on it. Honestly if anybody is devaluing human lives here it is Vlad, who was about to assassinate a house full of people who have done him no harm. Kelly points out, quite rightly, “for Easterners and Teckla in this world, these aren’t problems an individual can solve” and Vlad “Bootstraps” Taltos shoots back “I’m an individual. I solved them. I got out of there and made something of myself.” Ok buddy way to miss the point. This is a world where ten-year-olds (Natalia) are reduced to pickpocketing to survive. I don’t think the narrative comes down as strongly on the revolutionaries’ side as I would, but it sure doesn’t permit Vlad to persist in the delusion that he can refuse to pick a side. I’m dying to know what happened in the decades-ago uprising that took Vlad’s grandma’s life, and apparently turned Vlad’s dad into a reactionary, and why Vlad’s grandpa thinks that conflict was unavoidable but this one is ill-advised? I loved seeing Vlad’s Ravenclaw Secondary side which caused him physical pain when he had to change a plan at the last minute lmao. I missed Morrolan and Aliera, if only for the group dynamic born of long association—in the last book I remember Aliera threatening to do something stupid and/or wave a big stick around, and Vlad and Morrolan being entirely unmoved by her theatrics, and Vlad assuring newcomer Cawti it was fine, just Aliera being Aliera. I think Kragar is the real MVP and deserves a big fat raise & some stock options for working what sounds like 80 hour weeks at a critical time for the organization. I’m starting to get a better handle on Loiash, too—seeing a cross-section of Dragaeran society brings it home to me how lonely Vlad the Perpetual Outsider must’ve been all these years, and as a support system Loiash isn’t perfect but he’s a sight better than nothing. In conclusion SOLIDARITY FOREVER (for the union makes us strong).

Crossposts: https://tabacoychanel.livejournal.com/45559.html

James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn (2014) (The Expanse #4) Corey’s strengths are for me twofold: (1) dynamite pacing and (2) snappy dialogue. A few years back I gulped down all three published Expanse novels in a week and then I forgot about them. Before jumping into this, the fourth one, I brushed up on prior events by reading some synopses and imo this series is packing an EXCESSIVE quantity of plot. The planet Ilus is the bone of contention between the colonists who have illegally settled it and the Royal Charter Energy corporation who hold the title to it. It is decided that the way to unstick this sticky snafu of a situation is to shoot James “Galaxy’s Biggest Loose Cannon” Holden at it because “everybody hates him equally, so we can argue he’s impartial.” It only takes 0.3 seconds for the shooting to start. I am obviously here for the found family dynamics—Captain Holden would lay down his life for each and every member of his crew (this book contains a nail-biter of a hostage situation). I am emphatically not here for the existential hand-wringing over “Is Holden a killer?”—no he’s not, can we move on. Holden’s main antagonist is a guy who, if this were the Stanford Prison Study, would be gleefully torturing prisoners & stubbing out cigarettes in their eyes. So they are foils, and it’s impossible to get away from that civilization-vs-barbarism question I have already expressed negative interest in. At the novel’s halfway point there is detonated a literal and metaphorical bomb and the clock ticks down and it’s tense af. The pacing is, as I said, top-notch but also distinctively sci-fi—this is the most sci-fi book to ever sci-fi. I found it engrossing but I think the moral obviousness of it makes it an unlikely candidate for a reread.

Penelope Farmer, Charlotte Sometimes (1969) I love me a passive heroine. I love the ones who punch monsters in the throat, too—these two opinions can coexist—maybe they’re both variations on the theme of We Live in Society. So. Charlotte is thirteen, an age at which one’s identity is still nebulous and unformed, when she arrives at boarding school. Her bed has the magical property of erratically transporting her into the past. Every other morning she wakes up in 1918, in the body of a girl called Clare, and the plot ping-pongs between the two timelines. At one point Charlotte gets “stuck” in 1918, and while she’s anxious to return to her own time she admits “it was a relief to be one person instead of two, even if it was the wrong person.” You can say that again! She goes on to describe Clare as a skin she wears, which she feels “thickening” about her the longer she remains in 1918. The experience of being disoriented by one’s environment and assailed by doubt about one’s identity is, I think, a common one for young adults who are obsessed with questions of who they are vs. how the world sees them. This was cozy and charming but not bloodless: exactly what a children’s book ought to be be.

Steven Burst, Yendi (1987) (Vlad Taltos #2) It honestly feels like reading another Amber novel—this is a compliment bc I find Zelazny’s Amber books unputdownable. What threw me off about Book 1 is that it was structured like a mystery but not executed like one; and to be fair I don’t see how it could have been—we’re inside Vlad’s head the way we’re never inside Sherlock Holmes’s. Can’t keep the twists from the audience if your audience is literally inhabiting the investigator’s head. You can do lots of other cool things with unreliable narrators, which Zelazny did in the Amber books, and which

hamsterwoman assures are coming down the pike for Vlad (w00t can’t wait). Anyway this one’s another mystery that doesn’t feel like a mystery, but I liked it better because the stakes are more commensurate with a mystery: The worst thing that might have happened is …Vlad would have died? Morrolan and Aliera would have been replaced by…somebody else as Head of the House of Dragon? Which would’ve sucked because I like these characters but we’re not talking about the Doom of Middle-Earth here (in this house we are anti-military expansionism and I don’t relish the idea of the Empire starting a war of eastward expansion but I also don’t know any Easterners other than Vlad and Cawti?? “Easterners” is so abstract to me). So I was totally chill with the ratio of telling vs. showing involved in Vlad solving the central mystery aka why is this random dude intent on killing me. I’m on the fence on “would Vlad be a good guy to work for”—on the one hand, the one nonnegotiable quality you want in a minor crime boss is the ability to look after his own; or at the very least avenge them, or failing that to pay wergild to their families. Otoh his tolerance for incompetence is quite low and what happens if you, a minion, don’t make the cut? I liked that Vlad is backed into a corner from the get-go—he’s reactive not proactive for much of the book, and it was so interesting to observe the sort of strategies he reached for. There’s less of the Eastern witchcraft vs Dragaeran sorcery dichotomy that was prominent in Book 1, in favor of a couple of unflinching monologues that address the root of the problem: What’s it like to be perpetually Othered in your own country, what’s it like when being a “successful” immigrant who “makes it” out of the ghetto is no consolation. That final scene with his grandfather hurt me. I’m excited to move onto future books & learn more about the other Houses; what’s operative here is maybe not biological essentialism but it sure is some kind of essentialism that produces sentiments like “every Dragon wants to be Warlord” and the universal purity of contempt for the Teckla.

Crossposts: https://tabacoychanel.livejournal.com/45292.html

LOTR Reread: Appendix A: Annals of the Kings and the Rulers: I don’t know why fifteen-year-old me skipped the appendices but it would have signficantly augmented my enjoyment if I hadn’t. I’m starting with them this time and it’s the best decision I ever made in my life (why was I not apprised that like 25% of the Peter Jackson films are stitched from the appendices). Tolkien is clearly not here to tell a story in the conventional sense, because what kind of storyteller worth his salt would have shoved all that Sauruman foreshadowing, the juicy Denethor backstory, the Aragorn/Arwen courtship into the appendix??? Tolkien gives zero fucks if everybody, even walk-on cameo characters, has four different names and important locations are routinely renamed something else and this causes confusion & consternation in his readers. Because what Tolkien does care about is creating a lived-in world. Nuggets of info that stuck with me: The echoes of Pelennor Field in the founding of the Mark (which the Steward of Gondor granted to Eorl the Young to requite the late, unlooked for charge that saved Gondor’s hide), the divine origins of the breed of horses that spawned Gandalf’s Shadowfax, why they call it Helms Deep. Can you tell I’m a Rohan loyalist lmao. Amidst the babel of names that I defy anyone to keep track of one begins to discern a pattern, a self-perpetuating cycle of vengeance, an ancestor who didn’t receive his due, an insult that demands an answer, and round and round it goes. Catelyn Stark was right, and Ellaria Sand was right: Where does it end? Wow what happened to the Númenorians really brought home to me that LOTR is a story about the ordeal of exile. Kate Nepvu shares her thoughts on Tor.com and my sentiments are in line with hers, re: Appendix A was presented suboptimally and I would’ve preferred a combined A & B especially since I’m approaching this material for the first time and haven’t heard 90% of these names before. As for the other appendices … I glanced at them cursorily, and if someone as smart as Kate didn’t get much out of an exhaustive “Baggins of Hobbiton” family tree I sure as hell wasn’t going to.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002) The consensus seems to be it works better as an immigrant narrative than as an intersex or transgender narrative. I’m not saying “he’s a TERF throw him in the dungeon with JK Rowling” i’m saying parts of this book haven’t aged well (the gender essentialism). When I was fifteen I bounced off it bc I didn’t vibe with the narrative voice but now? The only way I could be having a better time is if I was high on cough syrup. I still think Cal’s voice is overly precious but I can recognize the authentic sentiments he’s trying to convey: every few pages a line hits me like a freight train.The humor lies in the incongruence between the high subject matter and the low register in which the tale is told. Using as his frame the kind of intergenerational family saga that’s gone out of vogue, Eugenides has given us a (partial, but not less true) history of the American twentieth century. And that’s the part that has aged well. It’s not a radical take, but it’s much more critical of the status quo than I expected (Lefty’s surreal experience at his short-lived factory job stood out to me for the ferocity with which it took the worker’s side over capital’s side; also the Detroit riots as “Second American Revolution” holy smokes). Cal doesn’t have a dating history; what he does have is a family history. I found the final third of the book tough going bc “identity” takes center stage while “family” fades into the background—look, if I’m going to read a book steeped in teenage angst I expect you to do me the basic courtesy of taking the subject matter seriously! This is where Eugenides’s playful tone tells against him (alas, it worked so beautifully in the first half). The ending was perfect and poetic and I cried but I wish I didn’t have to wade through 200 pages of “the trials of puberty” to get there. I think it’s pretty inarguable Cal did not so much discover his gender identity at age fourteen as discover that being a girl sucked in every possible way, and found the first available exit strategy. Can’t blame the kid.

Nina Allan, The Dollmaker (2019) “A court dwarf wouldn’t count as a lover though—he barely even counted as a person.” “Time was a device invented by humans to keep themselves sane.” I read Nina Allan’s The Race a few years ago and it has HAUNTED me despite my inability to grok what she was doing, or indeed what was happening. I had the same experience with The Dollmaker, only this time I managed to overanalyze less and enjoy it more. Nina Allan has the unsettling gift of the obverse-Guillermo-del-Toro: instead of making the monstrous familiar she makes the familiar monstrous. I went back over the book in my head after I was done to confirm that there were minimal speculative or supernatural elements. And yet you feel the cold edge of the uncanny in the shape of the very sentences. The Dollmaker is about a dollmaker, and about repressed & lonely misfits generally, but what it really is is an experiment in the form of the novel. The sheer recursivity of it is gobsmacking, stories within stories like nesting dolls, and what are the recurring archetypes? Conniving dwarves, persecuted homosexuals, unfaithful one-eyed queens, uneven friendships and imbalanced relationships. I’ve never seen anyone integrate nesting stories to such devastating effect except maybe Juliet Marillier, who has the advantage of working explicitly in the fairy-tale-retelling tradition. What Nina Allan is doing is much closer to Ted “i will fuck you up without you even noticing” Chiang. At the end of the day I still couldn’t tell you what the book was about but I know two things: (1) Allan is a short story writer who is only lately learning to be a novelist, and it shows. (2) Allan has the courage to portray cruel people with grotesque desires who don’t apologize for who they were, and I esteem her forever for that.

Crossposts: https://tabacoychanel.livejournal.com/44535.html

Rosemary Sutcliffe, The Eagle of the Ninth (1954) (Roman Britain #1) Soft like merino wool and twice as comfy. At the moment I’m reading a bunch of books that are clearly the products of the authors’ unfiltered id, and by contrast this book is polished to a mirror shine. I wish I’d read it when I was a kid—I can certainly see why it has such a cult following (

meretricula lent me her copy but failed to warn me that one-half of otp gifts the other a WOLFHOUND??? smh). It’s interesting to me that the Call to Adventure happens, by my reckoning, at the halfway mark; one would expect it to occur earlier. But this is not an adventure novel, though it is classified that way for genre-sorting purposes, and though Marcus appears to be having the time of his LIFE hamming it up as Demetrius of Alexandria. This is a story about the importance of keeping faith and the steep costs of doing so. It’s not in any way experimental or subversive. It’s just men of honor who find themselves on different sides of an arbitrary line in the sand. By the time we got to the denouement I knew how Marcus would choose, not just because Sutcliffe had leveraged the whole weight of the narrative behind that choice, but because I remembered the way Uncle Aquilus had chosen. I remembered Cradoc and Guern: they had all chosen to keep faith, whatever that meant in their circumstances. All those callbacks were very present in my mind. Anyway Rosemary Sutcliffe’s greatest literary contribution is imo proving the “I purchased this gladiator for my personal slave & now we’re in LOVE” setup can actually work. I’ve seen it done poorly (The Winner’s Curse ugh ugh ugh) and today is the blessed day when I finally saw it done right.

Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House (2019) (Alex Stern #1) Some kids get admitted to Ivies because they’re piano prodigies or Olympic medalists. Alex Stern gets into Yale because she can see dead people. Yale, it turns out, is lousy with occult societies. Alex is recruited by the Ethics Review Committee of these occult societies, Lethe House, which is supposed to keep the other eight houses in line. The lesson here is, never EVER tie the purse strings of the auditors to the largesse of the folks they’re supposed to be monitoring. “Murder mystery” was 100% the correct format for this story because the identity of the victim—a townie not a student, a druggie, a nobody—forces us to ask pointed questions about which lives matter and which are worthless & disposable. Alex herself, a hard-edged survivor who knows how to craft the perfectly calibrated lie for every mark, used to belong to the disposable multitude. Yale is her second chance. Bardugo (a Yale English undergraduate) gets to have her cake and eat it too—she has OPINIONS on the literary canon and she’s not shy about sharing them; at the same time she can have Alex’s high-school-dropout ass google any obscure authors/texts to clue in those of us who are less well read. Despite being very dark Ninth House fulfills the promise of Hogwarts and every other secret world coexisting behind ours like a palimpsest—there’s a sense of wonder when you’re first initiated into its mysteries (the disillusionment comes after) . Magic is rooted in specific places, and Alex is an uncommonly rootless person (her admission to Yale was presaged by the murder of the only living person she gave a single straw for). Darlington, her co-protagonist, is a character who has struck his roots deep here—just how deep we don’t find out until we learn about his grandpa in a flashback sequence that wrecked me emotionally. The other scene that gutted me was the video of Mercy under the influence of the date-rape drug. Those are the two threads unraveled by the murder investigation: (1) unremitting low-level violence against women is scary precisely because you never know when it’ll escalate into homicide and (2) the primacy of place as a kind of magical focusing crystal. I think this book was twice as long as it needed to be and Bardugo definitely over-researched it (I promise you Leigh, nobody is here for historically accurate tidbits about 19th century New England) to the point where the details were not informing the narrative, the narrative was fashioned to accommodate the details. It was not, thank god, an unbearable slog like Shadow and Bone. It was compulsively readable like King of Scars, but I won’t be rereading it like Six of Crows.

T. Kingfisher, The Twisted Ones (2019) “Hills aren’t like trees. They don’t subside in winter and come back in spring.” Unless, of course, they’re faerie hills. Our narrator, Mouse, is an freelance editor who inherits a haunted house. There are monsters in the woods. This is a fucking terrifying story but it’s also the funniest thing I’ve read in ages—I fell right away for Mouse’s voice, her dry wit, her carefully varied syntax, her dog. I too am the owner of a dumb-as-rocks dog who once ran off for an afternoon to play with somebody’s cows, and we were at our wit’s end; I cannot imagine how Mouse must have felt when hers was taken by faeries. By the time that happened I’d been screaming at her for a hundred pages to cut her losses and run. The irony is, a core component of Mouse’s identity is that her job is “to know the shape of stories and help other people hammer them into place,” and yet she doesn’t recognize the genre of this creepy found manuscript that lands in her lap? Y’all, it’s horror. Maybe you’d call it folk horror. Maybe Mouse knows this, and allows curiosity to overcome caution. “You could walk away from the rest… but it’s killing you to think there’s a weird book hidden somewhere and you might not get to read it.” Friends, this is a cautionary tale of how being too Ravenclaw can get you killed. Mouse is saved, ultimately, by the stubborn intervention of her Hufflepuff friend who insists on tagging along, because the takeaway here is “don’t let your neighbors get et by monsters alone.”

I enjoyed this book! I’ve been meaning to tackle T. Kingfisher for awhile, and I think a big factor in my enjoyment is that it’s not a dense book. In the beginning Mouse drifts between reading Regency romances and reading her found manuscript, and I think that’s a very telling parallel: Regency romances aren’t particularly dense either (this is why I object to shelving Austen in that genre: are you kidding me? Jane Austen? there’s sixteen subtexts to unpack per sentence, minimum). I read The Twisted Ones in 1.5 sittings, wrote this review in the remaining 0.5 sitting, and now I’m off to work.

Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002) Sue is born into a den of thieves in Victorian London and this is her big break, a job so lucrative it will set her up for life. It’s “area con woman gets played” but the stress is on the manner in which she gets played. The best way I can think of to explain the structure of this book is “inverse Inception”—imagine you’ve built a nesting doll of dream architectures, and you start at the deepest layer. With each successive revelation your world explodes and you keep being awoken into the next layer, until finally you surface into reality. Now Inception was a very stylish film while Fingersmith is the furthest thing from stylish. It’s above all a story about the unsexy business of waiting on other people, about how the absence of autonomy is a slow poison that will kill you as surely as a bullet. You need a bit of patience to unlock the ponderous narrative. (Once you do, however, you get not one but two subversions of the “lady impersonated by her maid” trope!!) I don’t think it’s a book I’d have enjoyed 5-10 years ago, but now that I’ve ripened into a bitter old hag I start vibrating at the frequency of glass when a book asks questions like: For a woman, what is authentic desire and what is forgery? Where is the line between feeling safe and feeling trapped? I’ve heard many glowing reports of Sarah Waters and they have all, if anything, undersold her. It’s hard to imagine how she could possibly top this.

SPOILERIFIC thoughts: This may be the best novel ever written. Jk jk Persuasion is the best novel ever written but this is a strong contender for second place. When a random prison guard mentioned offhand that both of Mrs Sucksby's daughters came to visit her on death row I started straight-up weeping. This book isn't just wlw, it centers the female relationships as the most important relationships--the core trio of Sue-Maud-Mrs Sucksby, yes, but also Dainty who is the only person to stand by Sue in the runup to the murder trial. I kept wondering during Part II how Maud was going to break into the sanitarium to rescue Sue and then it ends up Sue rescues HERSELF (and Maud too) using the skills that Mrs Sucksby taught her, skills that the "real" Miss Lilly would never have possessed. It chills me to think that if Maud had been the one locked up in a madhouse she may never have gotten out. There's no overlap between Maud's skillset and Sue's skillset--the scenes of Sue being made to sit with a chalkboard when she can barely write her own name were so painful--and yet neither of their skillsets avails them when it comes to escaping the straitjacket of patriarchy. That scene when Sue, Maud, and Mrs Sucksby stab Richard to death and it's unclear who delivered the killing blow? Freighted with a truckload of symbolic significance, isn't it.

Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011) “Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. Only in the middle was there safety. He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionally. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.” Genre fiction usually centers on its protagonist’s burning desire to do or be something. The (frustratingly passive) protagonist of Zone One is a cipher. His ostensible mission is to eradicate zombies in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of New York but his actual mission seems to be to banish past and future. If all writing exists on a continuum from “visceral” to “cerebral” Colson Whitehead falls squarely into the “cerebral” camp. I don’t say that to dunk on him—I’m pretty cerebral myself—just to explain why he captures the ennui of living under late-stage capitalism better than 99% of “realistic” fiction does. His satire bites; his protagonist is a guy who’s always identified more with the monstrous cyborg Other than with “normal” folks. Oh I was not expecting this fugue-like narrative to end in a jam-packed action sequence lmao. Tbh if Whitehead’s reputation hadn’t preceded him I’m not sure I’d have finished the book. It reads like a minor work from a major author, and I’m looking forward to The Underground Railroad.

Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside (Founders #1) (2018) In a staggeringly unequal city where property rights are worth more than human rights, Sancia is a thief who gets in over her head when she’s tasked with stealing something so valuable her employer can’t afford to let her live to tell of it. This book is one long series of chase scenes & would make a dope movie. Robert Jackson Bennett has certainly gotten better at building tension since City of Stairs; he doesn’t just load up the whole plate with worldbuilding anymore. Sancia acquires two major allies—one an undead revenant who periodically possesses her, the other the scion of merchant dynasty who’s trying to reform the broken system from the inside. It works out great because Clef has big chaotic dumbass energy and Gregor is nothing if not über-lawful! I will say this book managed to surprise me not once but twice in the third act, I was expecting it to fizzle out and instead I got two emotionally satisfying revelations. Is it a damn solid book? Yes. If I could go back in time would I tell my past self to just reread Six of Crows instead? Also yes.

LOTR Rewatch Spent 90% of it in panegyrics over how good the score was. I swear at this point I have a Pavlovian heartrate-speedup response to the “Riders of Rohan” fanfare—by the time we got to the big charge at Pelennor Fields (real talk how big was that brass section?? the size of a football field?) I was losing my goddamn mind. I remember now why Two Towers is my favorite—the action scenes bore me least. I didn’t even want to watch Fellowship but witcherology made me and I’m so glad she did, I DO NOT KNOW WHAT STRENGTH IS IN MY BLOOD BUT I WILL NOT LET THE WHITE CITY FALL NOR OUR PEOPLE FAIL and then he closes Boromir’s fingers around the hilt of his sword so he can go to Valhalla adfdfkjd. I also forgot that the whole reason “they’re taking the hobbits to Isengard” happened is bc Merry & Pippin threw themselves down on the chopping block as a distraction so Frodo could get away?? I hate Denethor in DIRECT proportion to how much I love his sons and I love his sons A LOT. It’s like … you can’t really hate Voldemort, so you hate Umbrage because she’s a real person? That’s why Denethor is The Worst thanks for coming to my ted talk. Friendly reminder folks make sure you watch the extended edition not the theatrical cut, otherwise you’ll miss Éowyn’s face when she finds out Aragorn is 87 years old. I had no subtitles and therefore no idea what Arwen, Elrond & co. were saying during those flashbacks but they were saying it sexily so it was fine.

My appreciation for Sam grew the most during this rewatch but my appreciation for Faramir deepened the most: his face when he heard “Osgilliath is lost” oh my baby boy would do anything not to disappoint Dad again. And I paid more attention to the elegiac quality of Tolkien’s “glory days are past” nostalgia that suffuses everything; how is it possible every third line out of Théoden’s mouth is poetry? Some things haven’t changed, anyway: Pippin singing that song still gives me chills.

me: hi it’s Karl "i have chemistry with everyone up to and including lamp posts" Urban
me: <merry + pippin’s orc captors turn on each other & they escape in the tumult> imagine if orcs just had access to lembas bread this whole fiasco coulda been avoided
atia: have you noticed liv’s eyes look almost violet sometimes bc of her clothes + the lighting
me: ”arwen evenstar, secret targaryen" --10k meta pending
me: <aragorn’s horse noses at him> this horse is my dog and aragorn is me lmao
me: ok these children you’re drafting are like TEN what the actual fuck Théoden??
atia: <the sewage drain at Helms Deep about to get blown up> oh the olympic torch guy
atia: remember when d&d said the battle of winterfell would be more epic than helm’s deep
me: to be entirely fair d&d did learn one thing from helms deep and that was to light everything exceptionally dark
atia: oh this is the extended edition where we get to see Sauruman yeet himself off that tower
atia: lotr is so terrifying when you’re a kid
me: ummm lotr is still terrifying
me: i did not realize Elrond had the gift of prophecy? Elrond for Professor of Divination 2k20
atia: i wonder if viggo found it easier to speak elvish since he speaks 3 languages
me: could be! how’s his spanish
atia: really good last time i heard it! he speaks with an argentinian accent so it’s incredibly bizarre to me when he opens his mouth and an argentinian talks
me: “none but the king of gondor may command me” yk this is the first time he’s come right out and said it “I am Isildur’s heir” every other time it’s been Gandalf or someone else filling in his backstory
atia: frodo and sam are in love fight me
me: “don’t go where i can’t follow” how u holding up bb?
atia: dying
atia: when will it stop hurting
me: “rohan has deserted us.” my dude. who was it refused to light the beacon fires lmao
atia: everybody has an arc
atia: although gimli's is just "maybe elves aren't so bad"
me: legolas doesn’t have an arc
atia: THAT SHINY SHIRT IS MINE i relate to this orc
me: hey i love the whole “merienda for the masses” concept, i am staunchly PRO SECOND BREAKFAST, but you ever feel like food in the Shire sounds kinda...bland
atia: yes even elvish food is bland
me: ik he doesn’t do anything for you but my opinion as someone who DOES find aragorn sexy is ranger!aragorn > king!aragorn it ain’t even close

highlights of my sync-read with

witcherology:

atia: i am DEVOURING the poppy war
atia: poor rin
atia: sinegard is so vivid!
atia: omg i went outside and there are so many mosquitoes this is why i am an indoors person
me: "this is why i am an indoors person" the title of our joint autobiography
atia: "oh you're the one nezha hates" this ship is sailing
me: will i ever recognize an enemies-to-lovers-ship in the wild? doubtful
atia: how...how do you not
me: have you seen my gideon the ninth writeup? the ship was RIGHT THERE the whole time and i just...didn't
atia: altan should be gay. and in love with his lieutenant i said what i said
me: i think Rachel Kuang successfully got us into the headspace of a sleep-deprived Scholarship Kid vying for a spot at elite boarding school, but now the war’s cut everyone’s education short i don’t find the narrative thread nearly as compelling
atia: you put it in wordsssss
me: tbf i wasn't crazy about deathly hallows either, hogwarts was the emotional core of hp
me: got to admit that Gandalf-saving-everybody’s-asses-from-the-Balrog moment was p spectacular

There's a word in Chinese to refer to the college-application process, they call it a 独木桥 which means one of those sketchy wooden rope bridges suspended over a yawning chasm. You have one shot; one test and it defines the rest of your life. Our penniless orphan protagonist Rin has to score well because she has no fallback: which makes her unlike Quentin Coldwater but like Darrow the Red, both of whom i'm mentioning here because acing The Impossibly Difficult Test to get into the Selective Institution is a big part of The Magicians and Red Rising. Rin's bloody singleminded focus drives the narrative all the way to Sinegard, but it hits a brick wall when the Federation invades and the country shifts to war footing.

I really wanted to like this book, and I came away quite fond of it because I felt like it was written FOR ME. For instance the trick with the scarecrows to scare up arrows from your enemies is straight out of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Somebody: I want Seven Treasure Soup! Me: You mean Eight Treasure Congee right?? Wtf is Seven Treasure Soup. Carrying a protesting piglet up a mountain and down again every morning is exactly the kind of repetitive rote exercise you see in these zero-to-hero martial arts training montages (i'm thinking specifically of Guo Jin climbing a sheer cliff face every night in Legends of the Condor Heroes). And I loved Rin: she's in it to win it, she has no margin for error and she'll hold a grudge unto the grave. You know how some people are touch-starved well this girl is praise-starved and it is both painful and mesmerizing to watch.

What let me down was 1) the secondary characters 2) the worldbuilding. About 60% of the way into the book we have: "And she didn't want to admit it, but Nezha was a welcome relief from Altan." Me: SAME BITCH SAME. Because the whole time we've been under siege in this coastal city under Altan's command I have been so bored, and finally Nezha shows up with the relief troops oh thank god. Which doesn't speak well of either Altan's characterization, or the second- and third-tier characters Rin's been bunking down with since she got her official military posting (you notice there's always a nice even number of squads or platoons and then there's the odd one out, the SHADOW division? in this case 12 for the zodiac and the thirteenth, which is the one Rin joined, is the special ops team). Admittedly the final-act reveal of Altan's Tragic Backstory Details brought me around somewhat, just not enough to make up for how utterly uninterested i was in him relative to how big of a role he played. plus i thought the conflict between the physical and spiritual realms was going to have a far bigger payoff than it did. i basically wanted this whole book to be the boarding school story it was for the first 30%

As far as the worldbuilding goes, my main complaint is there was a lot of important historical events (there were after all two Poppy Wars prior to this one, i still don't understand the difference between the Red Emperor and the Dragon Emperor tbh), political ramifications etc. that either confused me because i couldn't parse what was happening, or I just didn't care. like the buildup for the Alcatraz prison-facility left me completely meh. the "lies my teacher told me" coverup of the Speerly genocide was less meh but still kind of meh. i can't even be arsed to go back to dig up more examples. i think introducing all this stuff organically, feeding the infodumps to your readers drop by drop and timing it so the medicine takes effect at exactly the right moment is a skill that Lois McMaster Bujold excels at, I've never found anyone to match her, and I cannot really fault Rachel Kuang who is after all twenty-three years old and publishing a bestselling fantasy trilogy while going to grad school.

In conclusion: I'm glad I read it, I'm on the fence about continuing with the sequels, I'm interested in whatever direction Kuang's career takes off in (she's a delight to follow on social media).

Francis Spufford, Golden Hill (2016) “You have walked into a mesh of favors owing, where everybody knows everybody—even if none of them, as yet, know you.” If Black Sails was a book instead of a TV show, it would be this book. That is my verdict as someone whose favorite TV show of all time is Black Sails. It’s even set in roughly the same period, mid-18th century, only in New York rather than the Bahamas. It’s about theater, and truth, and storytelling, and it left this fizzy carbonated feeling in my stomach which it took me a minute to identify as hope. Is it a happy ending? By no means. Yet it is a happier ending than we deserve. This novel has both radical politics and taut storytelling, and despite the many obvious debts it owes to the notoriously messy picaresque genre I find it incredible that it never sags, not once; it hooks you from the first page and it just keeps pulling you along. The protagonist lands his ass in jail twice. In between there’s a duel and a jury trial and a play. The most inconvenient conceivable person walks in on him in flagrante delicto with an actress twice his age. But what is most impressive is not the exquisitely constructed over-the-top plot, or the piquancy with which Spufford evokes New York in that vanished era, or even the pitch-perfect emotionally devastating epistolary interludes. It was the treatment of money. The plot hinges on an absurdly large sum of money, and it is not clear to the reader whether this sum is real or illusory. Money is a token of trust, and this is in large part a book about the minutiae of financial transactions, which Spufford somehow packs with more pyrotechnics than any three Marvel movies combined. Of course when Smith befriended Septimus i went OH SHIT because Septimus is of one Political Faction, and Smith’s super sekrit mission means he must remain neutral amongst competing political factions and for me, personal vs. political loyalties in conflict? Bruh I was fucking t h r i v i n g. “I know why a magician claps his hands,” declares Tabitha towards the beginning, and again towards the end of the novel, and those words reorient the frame of the story for me: For is it not a heist? After all, stage magicians clap their hands for one reason and one reason only—to divert the audience’s attention.

Frances Hardinge, Cuckoo Song (2014) “We’re in-between folks, so scissors hate us. They want to snip us through and make sense of us, and there’s no sense to be made without killing us.” The most cogent explanation for why scissors are anathema to the fae tbh. Frances Hardinge, the best-kept secret in YA fiction, has written her best book yet. In terms of ideas it’s not as wrenchingly original as Gullstruck Island or A Face Like Glass, but it has so much fucking heart. Hardinge’s stories always have teeth but they are initially concealed beneath a suffocating atmosphere of Something Is Wrong But It’s Not The Thing You Think It Is. Our protagonist, Triss, is two things a girl should never be: angry and hungry. The novel opens with Triss cosseted by her adoring parents and escalating hostilities with her mortal enemy of a sister; by the time the novel ends the situation is quite the reverse. Hardinge’s knack for packing adult truth bombs into books for children is second only to Diana Wynne Jones, everybody go read her backlist immediately.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Passage (2008) (Sharing Knife #3) One of my few beefs with Bujold aka MY FAVORITE WRITER OF ALL TIME is that she’s not great with the “chemistry” dimension of romantic attraction. The problem is especially acute here because the main characters are in an established relationship (they’ve been married since Book 1) but what I noticed on this reread is that the presence of supporting characters mitigates that lack of chemistry? I skipped Books 1 & 2 bc they’re a snoozefest and I always felt she should’ve paced the series so all the action isn’t squeezed into books 3.5-4. But I realized that it’s not true that the stakes are low in 1 & 2!!! They slay a malice in Book 1, they slay a super advanced malice in Book 2 and it almost costs Dag’s life, and in Book 3 not even a single malice makes an appearance! You know who shows up halfway through Book 3 however? Remo and Barr!! They are #brotpgoals. They give Dag a purpose and a role (patrol leader) to step into, they remind him of his younger self, they’re an all-around riot and the character growth is unbelievable (I’m looking ahead to Book 4 when Barr chooses exile with Dag and Remo doesn’t—almighty god what a reversal). Book 3 is a quest narrative, and Remo and Barr are part of the Found Family that Dag & Fawn collect on their journey downriver. Since we can all agree that Found Family stories are the best stories, I cannot fathom why Bujold didn’t start assembling this one sooner—this was the element that was missing from Books 1 & 2. Tbf I can actually point to one instance that Bujold nailed the romantic chemistry between the leads and that was Paladin of Souls, where the secondary characters were much weaker than Remo & Barr (I mean Liss who? Foix who?) so idk if there’s a correlation there. The thing I love about Bujold is that I may not endorse her every authorial choice, but she rewards rereading and she especially rewards critical reading—this is my third time through the Sharing Knife books and it definitely won’t be my last.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Horizon (2009) (Sharing Knife #4) Bujold is an engineer’s daughter, and it shows. She’s spent the past thirty-odd years writing speculative fiction and winning every award in sight, and part of the reason is she’s peerless at explaining how complicated stuff works, and embedding those explanations organically in the plot. The technology at the center of this series is the sharing knife, which is forged by magic and designed to slay monsters. So far, so much standard fantasy fare. But as Dag’s midlife awakening catapults him from simple patroller to world’s most cutting-edge medicine maker, he cracks all these knife-making-related MYSTERIES; he singlehandedly invents Force shields (Lakewalkers=Jedi) and in the hands of a lesser writer his cogitations on such technical topics would have either (1) not made sense or (2) bored readers to tears. This is the book where it’s explicitly stated Dag’s aim is to remake the world—to make it safe for his own half-blood children, for all children everywhere, Lakewalkers and farmers must overcome their mutual mistrust and thrive together. I will say that Bujold lays it on a bit thick with the pro-natal propaganda—I get it! Kids are gr8! I want them myself! I just don’t think CHERISH YOUR CHILDREN is an unpopular stance that needs reinforcing? Then again what was I expecting from the lady who invented uterine replicators (this is not a knock on uterine replicators! they’re gr8 too! they are just indicative of how reproductive concerns have always lain at the heart of Bujold’s work, and how a world where “childfree” is the default is a pretty alien concept to her). Anyway Fawn is cute and I like that she exists—she’s small and fierce and hasn’t got a lick of Force-sensitivity or martial prowess—all her strengths lie in the domestic and interpersonal spheres—but speaking as someone who has major social anxiety and is introverted by nature, I couldn’t identify with her, and the lack of chemistry with Dag I covered already. Arkady otoh is prickly like a briar bush, likes to take long baths and I identified with him 100%.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Knife Children (2019) (Sharing Knife #4.5) “All true wealth is biological” are the truest words that have ever been uttered and it is at its core what every single one of Bujold’s books is about. This novella is just more directly about parenting than some of the others. It’s obviously not Bujold at her finest, but even Bujold at 60% capacity is better than most anybody else firing on all cylinders.

Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth (2019) (Locked Tomb #1) This book fucked me up. What I knew about it going in: (1) hyped to the rafters by everyone in my little corner of fandom (2) GAYGAYGAY. Me a quarter of the way in: Well I haven’t got within 10 meters of a ship it’s all ACTIONworldbuildingACTION i mean i’m not complaining I like that the pace is relentless but I thought there were supposed to be queers? Me halfway in: Turns out I’m just really bad at recognizing an enemies-to-lovers ship until it hits me over the head with a sledgehammer. “The entire point of me is you. You get that, right? That’s what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end.” If this was a fic the tags would 100% read #loyaltykink, because that’s what it’s about—the sworn swordsman, the leal retainer, and all the shapes that loyalty takes (Colum’s “You speak to me of oaths?” speech floored me bc he’s all “Bitch I am the oath”). The novel is constructed as a series of locked-room mysteries, and the key to unmasking the murderer is a very Agatha Christie sleight-of-hand where identities have been swapped and the real crime occurred before the suspects even arrived on the scene. It’s brilliant. Gideon Nav knows one thing and one thing only, and that is the sword. She’s incredibly obtuse in a lot of ways which makes her the perfect POV for a mystery. She also hasn’t got a non-ironic bone in her body, which renders the sincerity with which she eventually utters that “one flesh, one end” oath all the more poignant. This isn’t grimdark, it’s hopepunk: being kind and soft is not a sign of weakness, it’s an act of defiance in a brutal nihilistic world. I have not been so engrossed by a swordfight since Ellen Kushner; I have not encountered a string of such imaginative & unwholesomely specific insults since Scott Lynch. In her acknowledgements Tamsyn Muir includes a shoutout to some rando who commented on her Animorphs fic when she was fifteen?? ICONIC. Best book I read all year.

E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frakenweiler (1967) “Claudia had always known that she was meant for such fine things. Jamie, on the other hand, thought that running away from home to sleep in just another bed was really no challenge at all.” Claudia and Jamie are an unbeatable team whose strengths perfectly complement each other. I did not recall this book having such HUGE Anarchist Energy but it does, and it stands up to a reread superbly (anarchist in the sense of being hella skeptical of authority). E.L. Konigsburg was out here agitating for Eldest Daughter rights in the sixties— god bless. “I didn’t run away only to come home the same,” says Claudia, and that’s a mood.

Sharon Kay Penman, When Christ and His Saints Slept (1995) I’ve read four of Penman’s historical novels before, each centered on a historical figure: Llewelyn the Great (Here Be Dragons), Simon de Montfort (Falls the Shadow), Llewelyn ap Gruffydd (The Reckoning), Richard III (The Sunne in Splendour). The main problem with this book is it’s about The Anarchy (1135-1153 C.E.) but it’s not anchored by the overarching narrative of one life. The character who holds the two halves of the novel together is Ranulf, but even Ranulf cannot bridge the gulf between the “King Stephen vs Empress Maude” stalemate of the first half, and the “Henry II + Eleanor of Aquitaine = power couple” arc that is second half. It does feel like this is a warmup, a prequel to the later Plantagenet novels which focus solely on Henry + Eleanor + and their brood. Penman is an indifferent stylist but a magisterial writer, and that’s because when it comes to writing the whole is greater than the parts. In accordance with her general method, all of Stephen and Maude’s worst wounds are self-inflicted: There is something very High Tragedy about the way Stephen is a good man but a bad king, and Maude is—well it doesn’t matter what she is because the most salient fact about her will always be she’s a woman. Henry II, though. If Henry didn’t exist Machiavelli would probably have had to invent him—the consummate union of excellence in governance/statecraft and tactics/battle command in the same person. I always dive into a Penman book expecting to wash up wrecked a week later, so it was kind of anticlimactic to discover my heart firmly lodged in my ribcage on the final page.

Claire North, 84K (2018) Here’s the deal. I read Claire North’s debut, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, and I have been fruitlessly attempting to recreate that reading experience ever since. This is a perfectly competent book but it is not that. Next. (Fwiw Touch? Also not that, although technically I will concede Touch is probably a better book book than Harry August. The good news is she’s a fairly prolific author so keep ‘em coming lol.)

Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance (2014) (Stormlight Archive #2) “I don’t want my life to change because I’ve become a lighteyes … I want the lives of people like me—like I am now—to change.” Kaladin Stormblessed, ACTUAL LOVE OF MY LIFE. Contrast: Dalinar whose “well you just have to be twice as good by distinguishing yourself in the position I gave you, that’s how you change the world” rhetoric makes my skin crawl. Nah it ain’t fam. Dalinar may be be a good person who has never personally mistreated a darkeyes, but that’s beside the point. He still benefits from a highly unequal, unjust arrangement that places him at the tippy top of the social, economic & political pyramid. And the parshmen at the bottom. If the next book isn’t 100% about Parshmen Rights I’m out. this book—well there were moments i was on my feet cheering, like that four-on-one-duel where Kaladin is the only one with the cojones to jump into the ring, and Adolin’s “bridgeboy” goes from a term of disparagement to a term of endearment. When we found out the Shardbearer whom Kaladin killed in Amaram’s service was Shallan’s brother that was WELL-PLAYED SIR that punch really landed. Renarin turning out to be a Radiant is a pretty harsh indictment of the overvaluation of martial prowess, and I liked that too, but on the whole I didn’t like this book as much as Book 1 because I wanted MOAR KALADIN.

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (2019) “Nothing empire touches remains itself.” They say that science fiction is psychology and fantasy is sociology. If that’s true (and I don’t remember where I heard it) this book bucks that trend because it’s all in for both sci-fi (it’s a space opera!) and sociology. It’s been getting a lot of well-deserved buzz and I really enjoyed it. I do think it’s fair to point out it’s a story centered on whip-smart highly-educated bureaucrats and the imperial court they orbit; that the perspective of “ordinary” people is missing, and you feel the lack because in the course of the book there’s a revolution/coup?? But I mean, if you think about the Roman Empire (the author is a Byzantine scholar) the kinds of “barbarians” it attracted were always from the better-off stratum of “barbarian” society. I guess the chimney sweeps wouldn’t have been reading Catullus. Nothing empire touches remains itself.

Robert Galbraith, Lethal White (2018) (Cormoran Strike #4) The unresolved tension between the leads is A+ 10/10 but I feel like the actual mystery plot is not resolved as elegantly as I expected from JK Rowling? She’s like, the queen of tight plotting and I didn’t think she’d just round up 7 suspects only to let 6 of them off the hook with an apologetic shrug of “whoops that was a red herring.” There’s a metric shitton of gratuitous bashing of socialists & other lefties, which didn’t even faze me. What bothered me was the novel’s unevenness. The portion of it that was dedicated to character work was phenomenal. Rowling’s always had a gift for invoking petty and/or aggrieved secondary characters and she absolutely nailed it here, plus the main characters experience extraordinary personal growth while still bearing the scars of their traumas. Yet tbh Chamber of Secrets is a better mystery novel and I say this as someone who ranks Chamber of Secrets dead last on my personal “HP books, ranked” listicle.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the body, and primitive accumulation (2004) Pluses of academic writing: you get to raid the ENDNOTES and BIBLIOGRAPHY for more texts devoted to your topic of interest. Minuses of academic writing: dense as hell, puts you to sleep. Praise be to Silvia Federici whose arguments are uncommonly lucid and contain almostno bloat, though the sections covering the New World are definitely weaker than the European sections, which is where Federici’s speciality lies. She argues that the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages were a political project, a campaign of terror designed to decimate the power of peasant women, sever them from their communities, and subjugate their reproductive capacities to doing USEFUL stuff like accumulating surplus for capitalists. The parallel between the enclosure of public commons and the enclosure of women’s bodies & labor power—all done with an eye towards private profit—is one that will haunt me for the rest of my life. What an absolutely staggering work of scholarship. So glad I sprung for the physical copy so I could annotate copiously.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1848) It’s been 20 years and I’m still salty about Jo/Laurie. This is the first time I’ve actually reread it cover-to-cover instead of just reimbibing the shippiest bits and I gotta say, props to Louisa May Alcott who is a much better writer than I recalled. Her treatment of the process and the craft of writing is also right on; the 1994 movie by contrast just has Jo climb up into the garret and don her writing hat and hey presto, a manuscript. What I’d forgotten was Alcott’s mastery of tone to skewer a character—I won’t say she rivals Jane Austen in this department but she comes close. I had also forgotten how much of Part I in particular is just Jo repressing her desire to marry Beth and cart her off to a lesbian utopia bursting with grand pianos. My girl is dead set against any of her sisters marrying, insists she’ll man up herself in order to keep the family intact, and if you only read Part I you may well conclude she’s not wrong. Part II is painful because it’s where Alcott sinks my ship. Hate to say I can see why she does it?? It’s because Amy and Laurie have the most to learn from each other, and Alcott is all about GROWING and LEARNING as a person. You know what, the text doesn’t belong to Alcott. The text belongs to all of us, and I will proclaim Death of the Author from the rooftops. Jo and Laurie love each other without labels, they’re not “romantic” or “platonic,” they set no limits on that love.

Cat Sebastian, The Lawrence Browne Affair (2017) (Turner Series #2) You know why this mlm Regency was absolutely DELIGHTFUL? Because it’s literally kidfic. They bond over the kid, that’s the story. It’s not the whole story, I just mean the arrival of the kid kicks the plot into high gear, even if there isn’t undue focus on the kid as a character in his own right. God this book is so relatable: They both have the worst case of imposter syndrome. “Neither of us is normal but have we ever thought to question whether fitting in is good, or normality is desirable?” It’s that trope where “I’ve insinuated myself into your life under false pretenses and now I’ve gone and fallen in love with you, how do I make a clean breast of it,” meanwhile your romantic interest knows FULL WELL you’re a con artist and it doesn’t lessen their attachment in the slightest. Also relatable: Lawrence likes being alone, clings to routine because unscripted social interactions give him anxiety.

Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom (2004) (Saxon Stories #1) I marathoned all three seasons of the BBC/Netflix adaptation earlier this year and I gotta say, lead actor Alexander Dreymon and his combination of martial arts background and tenderness 100% makes the character. Whoever does the score for the show also knocked it out of the park. In comparison, the book falls flat. Uhtred comes off as merely bratty rather than deeply conflicted in his loyalties, which could be a function of his extreme youth—he’s 18 I think at the end of this installment. The Danish vs Saxon identity contest is less prominent here; he pretty much accepts he’s a Saxon. @ Bernard Cornwell your English ass is showing. There isn’t a real tight three-act structure, the plot just sort of meanders along from one battle to another (which is a hallmark of Cornwell’s writing, and never bothered me in his Grail Quest trilogy which are some of my favorite books of all time, so idk why it seems like weak sauce here) . One thing that remains constant is that Uhtred becomes irrational when threatened with the loss of things or people he considers MINE. Uhtred: sees a random dog paddling along in the middle of a storm. Uhtred: IS THAT RAGNAR’S DOG. Lmao.

Brandon Sanderson Oathbringer (2017) (Stormlight Archive #3) I opened this book with some trepidation because it is Dalinar’s book, the way Book 1 was Kaladin’s book and Book 2 was Shallan’s. I mean, all the flashbacks belong to Dalinar. You can tell Brandon Sanderson built this world around Dalinar, that Dalinar is more foundational to this ‘verse than any other character. And I gotta hand it to him, when I put the book down there were actual tears in my eyes: “The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says ‘journey before destination.’ But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, he journey ends. That failure becomes our destination. To love to journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.” I think about when Kaladin took the first oath way back in Book 1, when we first heard “journey before destination,” and I say BRAVO SIR BRAVO. I think about how Gavilar’s assassination is this primordial scene we keep circling back to; with each new book we return to the scene of the crime with a different POV and we keep peeling back the layers and upending everything we thought we knew. Other things I am here for: Shallan referring to Kaladin internally as Brightlord Brooding Eyes (I’m still recovering from how Sanderson sank my Kaladin/Shallan ship). Kaladin running into his archnemesis & ex-bully and all he can think is “Adolin would never be caughtdead in a coat three seasons out of date” lmao Kaladin x Adolin brOTP of the century. Ok but remember how I said while I was reading Book 2 “I hope Book 3 is 100% Rights for Parshmen”??? Well I called it didn’t I. Turns out humankind are the invaders—they literally rolled up from another planet which they had accidentally incinerated, they came as refugees and they proceeded to…enslave the indigenous parshmen. What. The fuck. Brandon Sanderson was born and raised in the USA, where the ideology of settler colonialism is fucking hegemonic. We are REALLY GOOD at conflating preemptive warfare with self-defense, dispossession with property rights enforcement. We tend to think of democratic self-rule as coextensive with coercive rule over alien subjects. Sanderson’s choice to dismiss out of hand the “would you give the land back to the parshmen” argument is troubling because it absolutely bolsters the settler colonial narrative that indigenous elimination is a necessary condition of settlers’ “freedom”. I realize that the parshmen are currently being led by Hitler but that’s a choice on Sanderson’s part. Giving us 95% human POVs is a choice. This is the story of humans reckoning with their blood-soaked history, not the story of parshmen throwing off their chains.

Georgette Heyer, Arabella (1949) Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for a bubbly Regency? Idk I felt like this one didn’t sparkle the way I expect Heyers to. There weren’t any urchins underfoot for either of the romantic leads to step in and surrogate-parent; there wasn’t even a B-couple (that I recall? I breezed thru this ngl). The whole conceit of the Big Lie that Arabella tells, that launches the plot, is just not quite enough to keep said plot humming. She tells the lie out of pride, is the thing; and her lil bro digs himself into debt out of pride; and while they are brought face to face with the consequences of that pride the hero, who is the rudest most arrogant sonovabitch you ever saw, somehow never is??? there’s this whole pivotal sequence that occurs offstage, when the hero leaves town for a few days, and it’s just not as good as the analogous sequence in Black Sheep when the hero leaves town and sets certain wheels in motion. I will not be rereading this one.

Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander (1970) (Aubreyad #1) “Dr. Maturin, please take your friend away … Tell him his ship is on fire – tell him anything. Only get him away – he will do himself such damage.” Lmfao i love how Stephen has known Jack for like, a month at this point? And people take one look at the situation and correctly size it up: yes Stephen you must be the man in charge of this fool. I mean ofc I ship it. That’s why I read the damn book, bc everyone and their grandma ships it. O’Brian can certainly write; the trouble is that the ratio of scenes that delighted/wrecked me to scenes that bored me was not as high as I would have liked (40/60 if I had to estimate). On the plus side I acquired (a) a much deeper appreciation for Will Laurence’s conflict between duty and honor (Temeraire is an Age of Sail fandom, just like Jane Austen!! so you see i had no choice i had to read the damn Aubreyad) and (b) a great deal of useful nautical knowledge which came in handy when I went on to binge all 4 seasons of Black Sails.

Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings (2010) (Stormlight Archive #1) This book took me 9 months to finish because of the three main POV characters I only gave a fuck about one of them. Also bc it’s 450k words, which is not as long as A Storm of Swords (480k) but longer than p much every other book in existence. The pov i cared about was Kaladin, who def has the clearest, most powerful arc in this book, and a very Gladiator arc it is too: The surgeon who became a soldier. The soldier who became a slave. The slave who became a bridgeman (ie. cannon fodder). The bridgeman who became … a demigod?? Basically. Like, I slog through this whole book and in the home stretch Brandon Sanderson comes out like GANGBUSTERS i’m telling you when Dalinar gave up that Shardblade my soul actually ascended.

Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky (2000) (Zones of Thought #2) It’s all pedal to the metal hard sci-fi until he slaps you in the face with poetry, isn’t it. The passage that the title of the book is taken from is like that. This is a classic space opera, the clash of 3 civilizations at different levels of technological development, two humanoid and one arachnid. What blows my mind is that the natural orientation of Spiderkind is downward – their sun goes supernova every couple of decades and they all gotta hunker down and hibernate in the deepest fastnesses they can fashion and wait it out. Thus for Spiders astronomy is a marginal field and its practitioners carry little prestige. Until a whole clutch of ALIENS show up in the neighborhood. The denouement of this novel is a great example of manipulating the audience in a way that doesn’t make them cry foul à la Game of Thrones S8. Yes, Vinge withholds knowledge from the reader, but if you go back to that pivotal debate scene and you reread the rest of the book, everything slots into place in a way that makes sense. And nobody is better than Vernor Vinge at depicting a gaslighting abuser from the inside (I don’t remember much from Book 1 but I do remember that). The technology at the center of this book is Focus, which is a sort of enslavement of the mind: “With Focus you got the capabilities of the subject without the humanity.” And the people who inflict this abhorrent technology on their own populace are the same people who repeatedly mind-rape one of the main characters. It made me see that the cardinal violation committed by the rapist is of the victim’s autonomy; it just so happens that we are corporal creatures, and that assault assumes a physical dimension. For me at least Tomas’s mental violation overshadows his physical violation of Qiwi. 5/5 will def reread

Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade #2) In Book 1 Baru Cormorant had two secrets: (1) she wanted to fuck women (2) she wanted to topple an empire down from the inside. She sacrificed (1) in order to further (2). Now she’s learning that in order to win she ultimately can’t keep spending people for power, and if I gave a single fuck about any of these characters this would have been a brutal reading experience. However, no fucks were given. Like, I’m intellectually fascinated by how the Evil Empire is apparently taking a page out of the World Bank/IMF playbook of “force structural adjustment loans on poor countries, privatize everything, extract profits, divert capital flows abroad.” but just because i endorse the politics of the novel doesn’t mean i have any emotional investment in its characters.

Seanan McGuire, Night and Silence (October Daye #12) How the fuck does she do it, juggle so many subplots and minor characters and not drop any of them. Seanan McGuire is no great stylist, and her plotting is by no stretch of the imagination tight, but by god can the woman pack an emotional sucker-punch like nobody else. I have the opposite problem with this book than Baru Cormorant: Love the characters, vehemently object to the politics. Like four books ago she contrived a ticking-time bomb terrorist scenario and I was like girl what???? There has never in recorded history been a documented ticking time bomb terrorist scenario, but even if there were, how does that justify torture. Why are you more concerned about the potential negative psychological effects of torture on the torturers than the actual manifestly negative effects on the victims.

Catherynne Valente, Six-Gun Snow White: I don’t always do well with experimental writing styles so I was iffy about this book but boy howdy did it hurt me good. “Love was a magic fairy spell. Didn’t the girls in my books hunt after love like it was a deer with a white tail? Didn’t love wake the dead? Didn’t that lady love the beast so much he turned into a good-looking white fellow? That was what love did. It turned you into something else.”

Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the structure of this story is based on Journey to the West. Individual scenes are powerful, even poetic, but the narrative itself is episodic–though not nearly as episodic as the actual Journey to the West. It’s all fast-paced forward momentum rollicking good yarn with a healthy dash of Found Family and how can you say no to that. Also, fuck Cartesian duality and fuck the Enlightenment: “Who needed bodies? Everyone, it turned out.”

Barbara Hambly, Stranger at the Wedding (Windrogse Chronicles #4) 85% bored out of my mind (maybe i should steer clear of the mystery genre) but the 15% I wasn’t bored by was worth the slog. You spend much of the book convinced the protag hates her father’s guts, they been estranged for YEARS, and then it turns out ofc that she loves her father—he wouldn’t have the power to hurt her otherwise. I’m getting war flashbacks to Eleanor Guthrie in Black Sails. But look at it from her dad’s perspective: He’s hemmed in on the one hand by widespread Antisemitic-inflected fear of the Mageborn; otoh there’s the misogyny that’s just baked into the bricks of society: a woman is her virtue is her reputation. He had no good options but there can be no doubt that he loves his daughter; what’s more he respects her competency. For a woman, sometimes it’s just as important to be valued as to be loved (see also: Irina and her father the Duke in Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver).

Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste for Bones (Brother Cadfael #1): I take that back about mysteries not being my jam– enjoyed this one thoroughly. It’s bc the murder mystery was the perfect encapsulation of the bigger political tensions at work in this story?? which is set in medieval Wales. They’re trying to relocate some saint’s bones for the greater glory of god and also the abbot of the monastery lol.

Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the new rules of language: Idk if anyone else has this experience but I’ll be texting my dad and then he’ll call me and I’m like Dad i’m at work or somewhere else it’s not convenient to pick up. My sister and I have spent hours speculating on why he does this, why he doesn’t just text back. My biggest takeaway from this book is: For most of us writing has “forked into formal and informal versions,” the latter of which is capable of expressing exquisite layers of social nuance. But for some people (like my dad), “all textual meaning is surface meaning, and if you want to convey anything more subtle (eg. irony) that’s what a voice conversation is for. Their assumption is that text is fundamentally incapable of conveying the full social landscape.”

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Entries tagged with reading roundup

stuff i read 14 Jan 2022

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fic i read 14 Jun 2020

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stuff i read 9 february 2020

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stuff i read 10 january 2020

R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War (2018) (Poppy War #1)

stuff i read in december

stuff i read november 2019

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stuff i read september 2019