Wednesday Reading Meme for Dec 17 2025
Dec. 17th, 2025 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishWhat I’ve Read
The Fortunate Fall – Cameron Reed – A book worth reading! I really enjoyed the writing style and it felt like it was making interesting observations about life in this future fictional world that mapped onto our own in surprising ways. This book was originally published in 1997 and it feels shockingly modern in the same way that 60s Star Trek does – sometimes a keen eye can just see where things might go and map out options, even if reality did end up in a slightly different direction.
I haven’t seen a summary of the plot anywhere, so I will write a short one: Vague spoilers under the cut!
Maya, our main character, is a news media personality in the 2300s who has had hardware installed in her skull to allow her to stream her direct experience to her viewers. She does have a mandatory editor, tho, who acts as a filter between her most intimate personal experiences and the audience, and also, to prevent sedition from being beamed out past the government censors. The story starts with her delving into a forgotten massacre at a forgotten prisoner of war camp from an overthrown authoritarian regime, now 50 years in the past from her present day. The plot of the book derives from her beginning this research and unearthing unexpected survivors of similar camps, and what comes up as she follows their leads. The story is heavily interested in suppressed history and how that impacts the modern day, and (like Fahrenheit 451) is that suppression better served by authoritarian memory holes or just distracting people long enough that they never bother to seek these things out and make connections. Maya is an old hand at her work, and the whole book feels like a very Used Future. People and societies are in a position to unpack their shit, and everyone is being wildly ungracious about it.
For my own experience, I blitzed thru most of it in late November, and then lost steam. Which was foolish! I was very close to the end, and I think that the lack of momentum detracted from my enjoyment of the finish.
This book made me think of Frankenstein, the novel, because it has a lot of direct narrative inside of Maya’s story, from the people she meets along the way in the course of this novel. One is a revolutionary who survived a political prisoner camp and medical experimentation. One is a survivor of a government assassination due to her queerness. One is the last whale on earth. One is a past version of Maya who has only now been made available to her again.
A lot of this book is about how telling a story is a complex thing, and there are multiple ways to figure yourself out thru the stories you tell about yourself, but also – not everyone is going to buy it.
I really liked it and I think it will actually unfold better on the re-read!
Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant – I think I can call it at this point: I am not for Mira Grant and Mira Grant is not for me. This book contains scenes that have action; it does not convey a feeling of action. It has scenes that contain horror; it does not convey a feeling of horror. The writing problems were on a scene level, as opposed to sentence or book level: Grant kept setting up scenes where vital and life-altering, even life-saving!, information would be almost revealed! But, then we pivot to another topic, interrupting the focus in the middle to add extraneous characterization or shift focus to something completely nonurgent, and never really getting back to the sharp punch she was winding up. The pacing got fucked. There was info-dumping about the wrong things, things that were not really relevant to the present situation! The cumulative effect was to make every character so wooden that even the ones that were deep and heroic slowly drained of all life after delivering extensive sidebars during life-threatening danger. I ended up complaining about this book at some length to a friend. I could have edited this book into something I adored and cut off about 25% of it. Since I had a similar, but not so pointed, set of thoughts about Newsflesh, I think this proves Grant is not for me. I heard good things about October Daye, but I hate the fey as a writing concept, so. Probably done here.
A Contracted Spouse for the Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath (audiobook) – Audiobook romance by a favorite author. This is the third in a series that focuses on the lives of Victorian working class people in a variety of jobs. Our heroine, Theodora, wants to be on the stage doing the fun, risque musical hall act that she has been working on for years – but her stuffy family wants to be respectable and will not allow that kind of act in their theatre! When her sister elopes and her brother pulls her out of acting entirely to work as the family’s drudge, Theo runs off to a prizefighter turned music act manager as part of a deal – she’ll marry him and give him control over her 25% share of the family theatre so that he can get his foot in the door and expand his music hall to the larger venue, and he has to support her male impersonator career attempt.
These books suffer a bit on the male leads – they are kind of big sexy small time businessmen with a surprising amount of self-insight for the period (and for their nationality). The women are FANTASTIC. They are so interestingly weird and trying to find an interesting life for themselves – these are the kind of women who end up the poor relation receiving charity in other books set in these periods, and overall, it’s really nice to see them thriving in unconventional jobs or settings. I am a sucker for people marrying for pragmatic economical historical reasons and then finding out how much they like each other.
A flaw in these books is that they often throw in an epilogue about how the female lead is So! Happy! To be! Pregnant!, and I'm like, thanks, I'll be skipping that, byyyyye.
What I’m Reading
Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities – on hold. (This book is just obnoxiously large.)
Heated Rivalry: Started and promptly abandoned. Thanks, but no, thanks. I have Ovechkin/Crosby RPF fic at home, I will not be accepting the watered down version. The show is cute and distinct enough that I’ll continue watching but the idea of reading hockey fic that filters out the hockey.... not for me.
The Hunger Games – Book club pick! I’m finding that this book stuck in my head surprisingly well. I think I read thru the original series but bailed on the final book.
What I’ll Read Next
Natural History of Dragons
The Fortunate Fall – Cameron Reed – A book worth reading! I really enjoyed the writing style and it felt like it was making interesting observations about life in this future fictional world that mapped onto our own in surprising ways. This book was originally published in 1997 and it feels shockingly modern in the same way that 60s Star Trek does – sometimes a keen eye can just see where things might go and map out options, even if reality did end up in a slightly different direction.
I haven’t seen a summary of the plot anywhere, so I will write a short one: Vague spoilers under the cut!
Maya, our main character, is a news media personality in the 2300s who has had hardware installed in her skull to allow her to stream her direct experience to her viewers. She does have a mandatory editor, tho, who acts as a filter between her most intimate personal experiences and the audience, and also, to prevent sedition from being beamed out past the government censors. The story starts with her delving into a forgotten massacre at a forgotten prisoner of war camp from an overthrown authoritarian regime, now 50 years in the past from her present day. The plot of the book derives from her beginning this research and unearthing unexpected survivors of similar camps, and what comes up as she follows their leads. The story is heavily interested in suppressed history and how that impacts the modern day, and (like Fahrenheit 451) is that suppression better served by authoritarian memory holes or just distracting people long enough that they never bother to seek these things out and make connections. Maya is an old hand at her work, and the whole book feels like a very Used Future. People and societies are in a position to unpack their shit, and everyone is being wildly ungracious about it.
For my own experience, I blitzed thru most of it in late November, and then lost steam. Which was foolish! I was very close to the end, and I think that the lack of momentum detracted from my enjoyment of the finish.
This book made me think of Frankenstein, the novel, because it has a lot of direct narrative inside of Maya’s story, from the people she meets along the way in the course of this novel. One is a revolutionary who survived a political prisoner camp and medical experimentation. One is a survivor of a government assassination due to her queerness. One is the last whale on earth. One is a past version of Maya who has only now been made available to her again.
A lot of this book is about how telling a story is a complex thing, and there are multiple ways to figure yourself out thru the stories you tell about yourself, but also – not everyone is going to buy it.
I really liked it and I think it will actually unfold better on the re-read!
Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant – I think I can call it at this point: I am not for Mira Grant and Mira Grant is not for me. This book contains scenes that have action; it does not convey a feeling of action. It has scenes that contain horror; it does not convey a feeling of horror. The writing problems were on a scene level, as opposed to sentence or book level: Grant kept setting up scenes where vital and life-altering, even life-saving!, information would be almost revealed! But, then we pivot to another topic, interrupting the focus in the middle to add extraneous characterization or shift focus to something completely nonurgent, and never really getting back to the sharp punch she was winding up. The pacing got fucked. There was info-dumping about the wrong things, things that were not really relevant to the present situation! The cumulative effect was to make every character so wooden that even the ones that were deep and heroic slowly drained of all life after delivering extensive sidebars during life-threatening danger. I ended up complaining about this book at some length to a friend. I could have edited this book into something I adored and cut off about 25% of it. Since I had a similar, but not so pointed, set of thoughts about Newsflesh, I think this proves Grant is not for me. I heard good things about October Daye, but I hate the fey as a writing concept, so. Probably done here.
A Contracted Spouse for the Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath (audiobook) – Audiobook romance by a favorite author. This is the third in a series that focuses on the lives of Victorian working class people in a variety of jobs. Our heroine, Theodora, wants to be on the stage doing the fun, risque musical hall act that she has been working on for years – but her stuffy family wants to be respectable and will not allow that kind of act in their theatre! When her sister elopes and her brother pulls her out of acting entirely to work as the family’s drudge, Theo runs off to a prizefighter turned music act manager as part of a deal – she’ll marry him and give him control over her 25% share of the family theatre so that he can get his foot in the door and expand his music hall to the larger venue, and he has to support her male impersonator career attempt.
These books suffer a bit on the male leads – they are kind of big sexy small time businessmen with a surprising amount of self-insight for the period (and for their nationality). The women are FANTASTIC. They are so interestingly weird and trying to find an interesting life for themselves – these are the kind of women who end up the poor relation receiving charity in other books set in these periods, and overall, it’s really nice to see them thriving in unconventional jobs or settings. I am a sucker for people marrying for pragmatic economical historical reasons and then finding out how much they like each other.
A flaw in these books is that they often throw in an epilogue about how the female lead is So! Happy! To be! Pregnant!, and I'm like, thanks, I'll be skipping that, byyyyye.
What I’m Reading
Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities – on hold. (This book is just obnoxiously large.)
Heated Rivalry: Started and promptly abandoned. Thanks, but no, thanks. I have Ovechkin/Crosby RPF fic at home, I will not be accepting the watered down version. The show is cute and distinct enough that I’ll continue watching but the idea of reading hockey fic that filters out the hockey.... not for me.
The Hunger Games – Book club pick! I’m finding that this book stuck in my head surprisingly well. I think I read thru the original series but bailed on the final book.
What I’ll Read Next
Natural History of Dragons
