What I've Read

just me against the sky by magneticwave - https://archiveofourown.org/works/42315729 (48K) Bat-family alternate universe where Tim Drake is a girl and never became Robin but was a different and kind of badass. Girl!Tim/Girl!Jason, but mostly pre-relationship. This is charming and a tender and wonderful look at who Tim is and could have been, in a slightly diffrent world than the comics are showing us. (I think I came across it in the bookmarks of SPQR (https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr) whose work in Mandalorian fandom is probably why I got into Star Wars prequel fanfic. ) "Just me against the sky" was a great fic to read, in part because it made me realize just how much of magneticwave's fic I have read in some many different fandoms. I went on a binge and re-read "staring down the barrel of the hot sun" and read "i want your warmth to stay beside me" for the first time and a few other shorter things - go, read their stuff, it's amazing.

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/83f3410a-8112-4958-93ff-6a7fbb184ff1) (Read by Michael Boatman, who deserves an Oscar) Read for Discord Book Club This book was totally outside my normal perview - a historical novel about John Brown's last few years of life, as told from a newly freed young mand who was mascarading as a girl for most of the novel. It's hilarious, it's painful, it's keenly attentive to the damage that suffering causes to the human soul under slavery, and it bounces between reverent and irreverent like a tennis ball in a dryer. Highly recommend. ( Somehow the book group discussion did not get into trans themes at all, but this book is from 2013 and the author is my mom's age so I don't think trans issues were at all on his mind. But it would make for a real discussion about gender as performance and how that works in the context of race for the space of the book.)


What I'm Reading

Phoenix Extravagant - by Yoon Ha Lee - (Read by Emily Woo Zeller) to the end of Chapter 11, for Xing Book Club - Man, this book is good. It's clearly cribbing off the Japanese invasion of Korea in a fantasy setting for languages and cultural notes, the main character is interesting. It's interested in the meaning and value of art to the culture that created it and what an invading culture values in those same works of art - the main character is an artist and they are dealing with the delicate balance of making a living under occupation while maintaining an identity as an artist and a person in their own culture. It doesn't cut quite as close to the soul as a A Memory Called Empire but that might be due to the fact that the narrator is a painter and I'm not. Lovely book, blitzed thru it as an audiook to the stopping point for the book club.

A Half Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys (Read by Kate Handford) - 37% read - also for Xing Book Club, but it's the next book out- A pastoral Earth that revolted and rebuilt to stave off climate apocalypse makes first contact with some aliens who have some fascinatingly different ideas about where sentient species should end up. Great themes! - people compare it to Le Guin and I see the commonalities but I'm going to see how it sticks the landing. The aliens see motherhood, specifically gestational motherhood, as a key sign of leadership ability, and so the main character's relationship with the aliens really has a lot of baby care woven in. Polyamory! Jews in the future! The alluring glitter of apocalyptic corporate culture in the far future. Espionage! Alternate forms of government!

Harrow the Ninth - 86% - Tamsyn Muir - When I get done with this book, I'm doing to have to do some screaming about it. What's notable about the reading experience is that so many people have told me that they read and enjoyed this series that there's a whole LIST of people I can go and scream at when something absurd happens. Is this the experience that people were having reading the Harry Potter books as they came out? Because I didn't, I was an awkward kid who read books to get away from people and not to connect with them, but man, I could see how the allure of this feeling would linger as a warm and fuzzy memory well past the point I finish this book. (Not to the point of remaining financially loyal to the author if she starts, ya know, targeting peopel for stocastic violence thru twitter, jesus fucking christ, some Harry Potter fans have some major fucking blinders on for their asshole) I accidentally created a bookclub around The Locked Tomb Series and its going well!

Men With Stakes - Julia Wright - still at 65% - need to finish the book for March 12th
A Very Good Book for the Great Queer Supernatural Re-Watch! Highly recommend for people who want to think about the show and the way it fit into concepts of masculinity as part of the landscape of tv. I wish the author would define her concept of "the gothic" somewhere in the book!


What I'll Read Next

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - Xing Book Club

Audiobooks from Libby that I need to get to: Spare by Harry No Last Name, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, Re-reads planned via audiobook for A Taste of Gold and Iron and Mexican Gothic (I got some friends to read it and it's landed very well and I want to talk about it again!)

Owned and need to read: Frey Marske's A Restless Truth, and Susanna Clarke's Pirenesi California Bones, Raven Song by IA Ashcroft, Kraken's Sacrifice by Katee Robert, Even Though I Know the End by CL Polk, True Colors by Karen Traviss, At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard, Tamryn Eradani's Enchanting Encounters Books 2 and 3, Like Real People Do by EL Massey, Tom Stoppard, invention of love. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and Other Myths about Fatness by Aubrey Gordon, Alisha Rai Partners in Crime, the Right Swipe, Aphorisms of Kerishdar


Work in Progress Wednesday (The Return)
Sock Madness was once again too much for me- I got one sock done and sent it in to be a cheerleader rather than on a team. I found this technique (intarsia in the round) a good stretch of skills but no way I was getting that done in time for the second sock. That said, I have started the second sock and I'm knitting it flat, against the rules of the competition socks, and it's sooooo much easier. Intarsia in the round, kids, not even once.

What I've Read
The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik - Oh, this is how you end a trilogy. This books took the relationships and themes and even the monsters that have followed the main character from the very first book, and hunted them all down to pull the last thematic dregs from their depths. I didn't quite cry when I found out what really happened to Orion, but man, it hurt. It hurt so good. El Higgins will always live in my heart. 

Mutually-Assured Destruction by Sineala -  Bucky/Tony 616 Marvel comics in the 1960s - Identity porn! 1960's Tony Stark is Iron Man and nobody knows. So when the Winter Soldier comes out of the Soviet Union to ask to join the Avengers on the condition that he doesn't ever tell anyone his name or reveal his face, even to Captain America.... Tony thinks, oh, maybe we could be friends? Maybe I can be a little bit myself with this one? And things snowball from there. This is a great fic by an author that loves the 1960s comics version of the Avengers, and honestly, the tone fits those comics so well. This fic was slipping into a warm bath - angsty just in measure to the comfort. I was following updates from Sineala's Patreon while she was writing it and I was so glad to see if come out!


Fic Rec based on Scholomance series: If you want a smaller, single person version of the themes in The Scholomance Trilogy, I heartily recommend two other works by Astolat (aka, Naomi Novik in her fic writing persona) -
-Heal Thyself a Draco post-canon character study about what damage using Dark Magic does to a person, and what it takes for Draco to really come out of it the other side. (Technically Harry/Draco, but only towards the end, well after Draco has done the work of fixing himself.)    
-Victory Condition: A Tranformers fic in which Megatron and Optimus Prime have to actually talk thru their world views, and Optimus Prime has to face that the Golden Age he remembered was built on the suffering of people he didn't see. (Honestly, I kind of recommended The Scholomance series to someone based on the idea that El Higgins is a Megatron with a bit more support and Orion the human is pretty clearly based on Orion Pax aka Optimus Prime, but with some complicated history.) 

Honorable mentions to fic that didn't quite make the novel-length cut: Don’t be afraid. by spqr -Star Wars, Anakin/Obi-Wan, ages reversed. I... I find this pairing normally not for me, and I am aware that this is working on me because I love fic where a traumatized character is confronted with love and care, and well, this did the job. 

What I'm Reading

Homeworld Elegy - Ashcroft Writes - Star Wars AU - Obi-Wan/ Cad Bane - 138K words -Once I got some momentum on this fic, I'm just flying thru it. I'm in a section that creates a whole history for Cad Bane and Duros and their world and his childhood romance with a friend, and I'm like, I thought this was just a mean blue man in a big hat, and now you are making my feel emotions??? It's just working for me really well. 

Two Old Women by Velma Wallis - I'm just not finishing this very quickly, dunno why. The voice just feels like listening to someone telling a story. 

What I'll Read Next:

Library books are on hold for this week because I'm going to be traveling, unless I get finished with them before I go. 

What I've Read
The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner (Book Club ) This is a solidly plotted story in a well-built world. I felt like there was a potential for either a little more in the third act for the criminal plot, but one of the things I appreciated about this book was that the protagonist react to horrible violence with actual trauma - so I'm not sad it ended when it did. A book that is very interested in class and in violence done by economics, and also how necromancy can be used to make drugs. Trans character! Cultural normative queer relationships! 

Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Hugos 2022 Nominee for Best Novella) - I really like the concept of this book! One character thinks their setting is a high fantasy and they are seeking help from a wizard. One character thinks he's an anthropologist abandoned on a distant human colony world that fell back into feudalism. Delightfully, neither is completely right in their interpretations of the world that they are seeing! Very much a book that could be put into conversation with The Thing (1982) in terms of questions about how to face a future where your death is assured. Not bleak, tho. 

What I'm Reading
Monstress, Vol. 6: The Vow by Marjorie M. Liu with Sana Takeda (Illustrator) (Hugos 2022 Nominee for Best Graphic Story or Comic) - I am so lost in the book. I almost cut out this category because so many of these are collections from an ongoing story, and I definitely feel like I walked halfway into Dracula and needed to ask who Van Helsing is. I'm going to dig into a wiki and see if I can figure this out any better. But I kind of think that the main character might have started a war. 

Monsters in the Closet by Harry Benshoff - An ongoing and excellent nonfiction entry into the Great Queer Supernatural Rewatch Project. I'm on Chapter 2 this week, "Shock Treatment: Curing the monster queer during World War II" and it's making me think I need to watch Dracula's Daughter.

What I'll Read Next
A Master of Djinn, Far Sector, Something in the Blood, Once and Future: Parliament of Magpies, Die: Bleed, Bedlam Stacks, Space Opera, For the Wolf, Golden Age  .... look, I just got a lot of books out from the library.
Books I Bought
- Seeing Like an Activist, How to Survive A Plague, Make Sew and Mend 

What I've Read
I have given up on Midnight Sun! Because, good god. Why bother.

I also gave up on the audiobook of True Believer, the autobiography of Stan Lee. It's just organized with a very odd way of bouncing back and forth in time, and not particular compassion for the living people involved.

I have finished nothing else, somehow. I think I was on a visual media kick this week - I slipped back into the second season of the Punisher because someone was talking about it on Tumblr, I watched like 10 episodes of The Story of Yanxi Palace. I saw The Batman!


What I'm Reading

Still on The Galaxy and the Ground Within - it's getting to the good parts!
Edit from Thursday: Having just finished this book, I can speak with authority - the endings are the good parts. The epilogues for each other characters were each a full culmination of the experiences that they'd had while stuck on the little planet. They were excellently composed vignettes for each character, built entirely on the relationships and conversations they'd had with the other former strangers trapped with them. I am so glad I persevered to the end of this book!

Have not touched Four Profound Weaves because I want to read it for next week.

What I'll Read Next

Monsters in the Closet - next up in the Great Queer Supernatural Re-watch Reading Club.

How did I re-read the Thief series and forget about the final book in the series? Which I have never read before! I'm a fool. I have it got it from the library as an audiobook and I'm delighted to start it soon.

I'm going to read Being Seen, the Past is Red, Never Say You Can't Survive.

I am freshly back online from a lovely vacation that involved very little structured time - exactly what I needed!

We visited some friends in southern states, which involved some magnificent fish dishes and some truly excellent BBQ. (After a lovely sampling of available sauces, I have picked a mustardy one that went well on everything, and purchased a bottle to take home.)

Bookwise, I picked up Andy Weir's most recent book, Project Hail Mary, a novel very much in line with The Martian for "smart person does thoughtful science carefully for high stakes and laudable goals." Overall I thought it was a fun and fast-paced read with a character, Ryland Grace, an extremely smart person who is also doing some really interesting things.

I do notice an element from The Martian that has carried over here, which is that Weir is pessimistic about politics and governments functioning together well and quickly in groups when faced with major stakes - in The Martian, this is handled by having all the committed scientists do an end-run around the politicians of their various countries to work together directly, any fallout in their future be damned- and Weir just doesn't really return to that, but it feels relatively natural; in PHM, this is handled by giving one character a 'get out of international law free' card for the scope of the scientific project they are working on, and then pointing out that there will be consequences for their actions later. While I think the second approach might better convey the idea that, actually, it's quite hard to make large groups of people work towards a single goal, no matter how much it's in their own interests, I preferred the first approach. PHM shunts the problem of imperfect authority to one side and says, this single person will make the right call - which is just moving the problem of authority onto one person rather than handling it.

I'm mentioning it here because I'm chewing it over a bit - it's pretty clearly a plot device to let Grace get to the cool science faster with less political discussion and I think it does the job quite well. But, man, if they had picked the wrong person to be the de-facto dictator of the big important science, none of this would have worked at all. 

I'm also reading House of Leaves, which I have started before and put down before - I think this time will be better because I am less freaked out by the horror elements, and I have more time to devote to reading it on this vacation. I'm also letting myself write in the margins a lot, which is a great way of tracking my progress and my thoughts in a book this prone to sending the reader towards the end notes. 

I am back from my college reunion and flush with the feeling that I went to an amazing place for school, full of amazing people, and I am so, so glad I never have to be a student there again. God, it was a wonderful experience. My dear friend A was staying with me and we roomed together and it had all the great parts of being young and deeply friends with people while all trapped in one beautiful space together.

We ate junkfood and watched Speed and my god, Keanue Reeves was so clearly into Sandra Bullock that it doesn't even bear thinking about. We also watched Destination Wedding, which is basically older Keanu being super into Winona Ryder in a very Stoppard kind of way. Delightful. 

I am also reading a great book, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and it's really fun and each other characters feels like a real person, no matter how alien. 

In work updates, from my day back, my annoying colleague who will never stop trying to game her metrics is now wants tech support to add a field to a report I created for her. M

ind you, I had already pulled report (some 200+ people in a geographic area), and given her a highlighted version of the resulting list so that she would reach out to some of the people there - she will probably be able to meet with, max, 10. But! I didn't give her the list of the email addresses with it, and she can't figure out how to add it, so she's bugging me to start the process over from nothing, instead of using the database to reach out to the 20 or so people I highlighted as being a particularly good place to start by looking them up, with their email addresses, in the context of deciding if they are worth reaching out to. 

Why am I not re-running the list and giving it to her again? Because I gave her the report and she's had the exact same lessons I have had about how to adjust it, AND I walked her thru it live at her request. So, no. She can look up the people in the database, evaluated them as one, and then decide to email them as needed. She shouldn't be keeping the Excel sheet as her notes - she doesn't need the email for all  of them. She needs to email 10, maybe, and she has the information she needs to find that. 

I'm reading a book!  It's called City of Stairs by  Robert Jackson Bennett - it's pretty good so far, and I'm not going to spoil anything for folks (particularly since I have only read up to Chapter 6 "A Memory Engraved" myself at this point), BUT I'm going to complain about something kind of pedantic that I can't unsee - NO Spoilers beyond, like, the first 20 pages.

The book so far is pretty great - the main character is investigating a crime in a colonized city called Bulikov, semi based on (medieval? Imperial?) Russia, that has this really interesting history!

Bulikov used to be fundamentally constructed using some magical principles, including one that was fundamentally interwoven into its architecture and construction, so that when [historical, off-screen spoiler happened] the architecture of the medieval walled city of Bulikov was fundamentally broken and warped in a single instant.

Whole sections of the city snapped out of existence in The Blink, while other twisted and changed and started to overlap in unplanned ways. The city is characterized by hundred of sets of stairs that used to lead to buildings or paths that are just gone and now they just hang in the air, ominous and weird. In the intervening century or so, the city went from being the capital of an empire to being a completely screwed up backwater - there's very little trade, the climate got drastically colder and wetter, and the people who live there have resisted cooperating with their new ruling government so the infrastructure seems like it's very fucked. Very little has been done to make it a more livable place since the horrific disaster that befell it. 

Now, this is all great and cool and makes sense! Interesting history and worldbuilding, totally fascinating stuff, really atmospheric and awesome - I'm honestly super into it. 

What doesn't make is the cars.

The main character is driven everywhere in cars, and people drive in and get in and out of cars all the time. Cars are driven without commentary on the ride, the roads, the people driving them, who hires them, or the kind of vehicle it is. Again, I'm only six chapters in, maybe this gets fleshed out later, but for now, the cars are driving me up the walls. 

Because cars in a medieval style walled city barely make sense if there has been a rich government pushing through funding for streets maintenance and repair on a regular basis for a century.  Look at Europe - in older cities, that have had lots of money to rebuild and maintain roads, cars are still kind of poorly fitted into the structure of the really old parts of the city where the roads are narrow and twisty. I live in Boston, and cars just barely make sense here, where there's been a huge cultural push to make sure that there's always space for cars. The spacing of roads, buildings, intersections, all make for challenging conditions to drive in, and that's with basically constant attention to the roads and huge financial investment in their maintenance on a local and federal level.

If Bulikov's covered in staircases that go nowhere, never removed or maintained, aren't there a bunch of roads that similarly don't make any sense anymore? Roads that just end in weird places, or don't connect to any other roads at all, or end in cliffs or mountains where bridges or tunnels used to be? Or roads that are vastly wider in some places and narrow dramatically for no reason, so that you have to squeeze oddly down for no reason?  Roads that connect with radically different historical paving methods, cobblestone here and asphalt over here?

How is this Bulikov navigable by car, if there are places where it's hardly navigable on foot due to the disruption caused by disaster and disrepair?

And the weather change would also make the existing roads awful! Roads constructed for a warm dry climate would not last over cold wet winters - one of the reason roads in Boston are so bad is that the freeze-thaw cycle of ice over each winter widens cracks and breaks thru the top layers into the substructure below. And that's with roads that were purpose built for cold hard winters - the remaining roads in Bulikov should be falling apart, even if they didn't poof out of existence all at once. 

So, the answer to my feelings is, of course, that cars work because the author wants characters to travel and kind of didn't care about the roads and didn't actually invest a lot of time in figuring out if cars would work or not. Which is fine! Not all elements of a world need to be equally fleshed out - there needs to be space for story. Or, possibly, since I'm coming at this from the middle of the book, this is all fleshed out and there's some reason why cars are different or the roads are repaved, or something, and it's all explained.

But for now, every time I read a passage about how the character just gets into a car and then arrives someplace else, I want to tear my hair out and go, EXPLAIN.

Is this a thing for folks? Are there books out there you love that just have, like, ONE nitpicky little detail in the worldbuilding that feels off? Or that you love everything about it so much and the worldbuilding hiccups don't phase you?