Reading and watching journal for Wed August 26 2026

Reading:
What I’ve Read
Loveless Vol 1 by Yun Kouga – I am confused! I am intrigued by the worldbuilding, which I know is used in some crossover fics that would be interesting to me, so I am pushing thru, but there are some elements of the main characters that make me want to just… shake people.

being this close ain't close enough by fortunehasgivenup - https://archiveofourown.org/works/42237966 - KinnPorsche Soulmate AU -I found this really compelling but also felt like it focused a lot on the dynamics of the early part of the show and not the later more lush fucked up and Gothic ending. So, recommend for the complicated dynamics of being fate-married to a mafia boss.

Kingfisher Feathers by anonymous - https://archiveofourown.org/works/25604389 – Untamed - A harem ABO au where Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are bonded but LWJ does not know this and proceeds to create an imperial harem anyways. Welp. Unfinished and given the last update was in 2024, I am operating on the assumption that it will not be finished. However, I had a wonderful time.

What I’m Reading:

Mockingjay – a bit slow to get into it but not without charmg.

What I’ll Read Next
No idea, I am in the throes of a new fandom.

Shows and Movies
What I've Watched:

On the Rad East Asian Four-Act Story Structure by Henry Lien - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYTkL2QhhFs – really interesting analysis of how a different story structure works in Asian story telling, with examples from Parasite and Mario!

Kinnporsche (Thai, 2022) I think this was incredibly popular in 2022 when it was airing and I was just on the edges of that fandom. I have complex thoughts but man, it was not afraid of the audience and it was messy and alive and ended on this tragic Gothic note that I really enjoyed. I adored the show really leaning into the parallels between the main couple’s relationship problems and situations (Kinn and Porsche) and the secondary couple’s problems, which are the same ones, just turned up to eleven. I really liked the level of attention to performance – I was somewhat inclined to go back and rewatch the whole thing again from the start to see if I had missed anything.

The Servant Prince (Japan, しもべの王子様, 2026) Honestly quite sweet – there’s a structural power exchange relationship between the two leads, but the plot is largely about the ostensible dom coming out of a deep depression and redisovering life, and the sub being a terrifyingly effective CEO who will take revenge against his boyfriend’s awful family. The dynamics are fantastic. There is a terrible wig.

Don’t Be Too Emotional – (Thai, ongoing) – Complex emotional realtionships to debt! Yup! That will in fact get you if you don’t talk about it beforehand.

Wednesday Reading Meme for July 29th

I skipped a week because my brain fixated on a bunch of BL novels and shows!

What I’ve Watched
Ball Boy Tactics – Sweet, a bit angsty but not too bad. A small and cute former Olympian falls for a basketball player at his new university

The Prosecutor’s Proposal – Dark and fucked up! Went in spoiled for the major twist, still had a great time with it.

Thundercloud Rainstorm – Wild, absurd, enjoyed it a great deal. Stoic asshole slowly falling for a conniving and sweet boy, with a touch of grief. I enjoyed it immensely.


What I’ve Read
The River has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar – A personalized and slightly more queer version of a traditional murder ballad! I liked it a great deal.

Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and Olena Bormashenko (Translator) – a newish translation of a 1970s scifi novel. Aliens are real and they fucked off from Earth before we even really noticed they were here. Set in vignettes around contaminated Zones of post-alien incursion, the book follows a very working class Russian-feeling story of a person staring down the barrel of a massive historical shift. (but technically not in Russia)

Payback by SamK, translated by Publang team
- Ok, this was simply a great translation with good (but not invasive) localization from Korean to English. The story hinges on a character, Lee Yoohan, who fucked up his life and lost his family as a young man – some of it by horrible luck and some by outright betrayal and some by his own damned fault. He starts slowly finding his way back to the realm of human connection and his own feelings after he discovers that his former lover, who fucked him over monumentally, is thriving as an actor – and Lee Yoohan decides to pursue a career in entertainment as revenge. He gets a psychotic new boyfriend and a newfound love of acting and slowly unfolds into a kind of decent human being. This has been adapted into a Thai BL drama that will be completed next week and that I am enjoying watching, a bit more slowly.

Samk did a great job writing this and the translation team did a great job translating it and I had a wonderful time reading it.

What I’m Reading
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor – not doing much for me at the halfway point – the reflections on her family and life are fascinating, tho.

You sit there in your heartache (waiting on some beautiful boy) by
rawrasaurus – Superman 2025 Clark/Lex – confusingly unconnected to Smallville!

The Prosecutor's Office's Proposal by singNsong – basis of another BL show I watched.

What I’ll Read Next
The Bird King G Willow Wilson
Mockingjay Suzanne Collins
War for the Oaks Emma Bull
Ficciones Jorge Luis Borges

What I’ve Read

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (novel), Vol. 1 – by singNsong - translated HYE YOUNG IM (Translator), J. Torres (Translator), BLACKBOX (Illustrator) – A bit of an edgelord take on a transmigration novel – or maybe it’s portal fantasy? Not entirely sure where one genre ends and the other begins. Basically, a Korean fan of a particular webnovel finds himself in the middle of that novel, and as the only person who had finished the book, he’s got a whole strategy worked out for how to game this system. Heavy video game influence, rather edgelordy view of the world and how everyone one earth would simply turn on each other at the drop of a hat. I got into it because there’s some interesting AU fanfic and I think, from what I’ve gleaned, the book has a mechanic where you get to play around with time. But I am just not sure. It’s all a bit inside baseball – the book is written with the expectation that the reader is very familiar with certain genre tropes. As a translation from Korean, I suspect some of the clunkier translations are actually artifacts of the original version using “English is cool” that the translators had to stick with – including things like using “stigma” to mean “in-world bonus power given by external forces,” rather than, ya know, a stigma.

 

The Raven Scholar – Hodgson –So, interestingly, the book had some surprises left for me! The last 20% of the book still had some plotty revelations that landed quite well, and layered in enough intrigue that I am interested in seeing where the trilogy goes. I do have some complaints – while the book was less meandering than I thought (turns out some of the wandering was set-up for later fun payoffs), it was still quite repetitious and did not seem to trust me to follow along with it. And, well, fine. That’s okay. I think the narrator’s viewpoint was done somewhat messily (omniscient third person works well for a character who is actually omniscient), the prose was fine but not inspired. The overall issue I had was just a sense of shallowness? The characters don’t seem to actually believe in their religion, the cultural differences should result in characters with actually alien values, but don’t, and the sense of the thing was just… like GRRM – someone dabbling with imaginary cultures instead of really digging into what makes them different. The fact that it’s an English writer, who layers in a few extremely English touches, doing an Asian inspired world, made me a bit leery, but she mostly lands it. Just. Not deeply. It’s up for the Hugo best novel and if it wins I will be disappointed, but it’s not a bad book and I think most people will like reading it.

 

 

What I’m Reading

Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint vol 2 SingNSong – Not very far in, but there’s already been a situation where post apocalyptic survivors have banded together and become dependent on a team of thugs to protect them, and I’m like, man, I would be happy to never see this trope again. Seems like a shallow edgelordy kind of take. I have a sense that this book gets into structural weirdness that I would enjoy, but it’s taking some time to pan out.

Shroud – Tchaikovsky – Continues to be weird and interesting and awful. Capitalist post-Earth space hellscape with a distinctly unfriendly planet to explore.

Three Bags Full Leonie Swann with A.J. Finn, Anthea Bell (Translator), Caroline Lennon (Narrator) – Wonderful, fun, really digging into how weird the world would look to sheep and how that would impact their attempts at solving the murder of their shepherd.
 

What I’ll Read Next

Set My Hand Upon the Plough by E. M. Barraud – A memoir of a lesbian’s time as a landgirl! I would love to find an ebook of this, because it seems to be reprinted a couple years ago by a tiny English press. Alas, the only place to buy it is Amazon and I am so so bad with paper books these days.
 

Hugos Reading Check In:
Awards are August 30^th (I think)

By my very rough count, I have finished about 45% of the Hugos reading I intend to do. (Based on page count, and excluding items that have specifically no page count [the Spreadsheet of Doom, podcast episodes] or have uncountably large page counts [A Girl and Her Fed has been running for 20 years])

 

Completed Hugos Reading:

A Drop of Corruption Robert Jackson Bennett Pre-Nomination
The Incandescent Emily Tesh Pre-Nomination
Cinder House Freya Marske Pre-Nomination
What Stalks the Deep T. Kingfisher Pre-Nomination
The Everlasting Alix E. Harrow May 2026
The Raven Scholar Antonia Hodgson 6/23/26
Inventing the Renaissance Ada Palmer 6/9/26

 

Incomplete Hugos Reading (items over 100 pages)

Death of the Author Nnedi Okorafor Novel
Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction Paul Kincaid Related Work
A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel written by Ursula K. Le Guin Graphic Story
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler Susana M. Morris Related Work
Absolute Wonder Woman Vol. 1: The Last Amazon written by Kelly Thompson Graphic Story
The Space Cat written by Nnedi Okorafor Graphic Story
Automatic Noodle Annalee Newitz Novella
The Summer War Naomi Novik Novella
The Power Fantasy Volume 1: The Superpowers written by Kieron Gillen Graphic Story
The River Has Roots Amal El-Mohtar Novella
Murder by Memory Olivia Waite Novella

 

 

Reading Journal June 10 2026

What I’ve Read
Out of the Dead Land by orphan_account - https://archiveofourown.org/works/1871955 - Really good solid Bucky-centric novel-length fic with creepy robots - the ending landed very well. I love alienation from the self as a theme, I love when it’s weaponized, I love when people are actually allowed to be fucked up by the things that fuck them up.

cast your bitterness into the sea by Kilerkki – Untamed Fanfic, Jiang Cheng/ Original Female Sect Leader - Also an older fic (2021, I guess that’s older) that I was returning to. This is technically unfinished, but seems like it lands in a solid spot for a “for now” ending. Jiang Cheng’s competent in this, solid and reliable in a way that the brilliance of his family can overshadow in the main series. This fic shows him slowly coming into an adult understanding of how, in the right hands, he could be a weapon. Also, morally complex sect leader OFC!

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch #3) – I am so glad I went back to this series. This trilogy has the tightness of a single story in satisfying chapters – I was seeing payoffs from the first book come up in this final book. Breq using the cards dealt her to actually break free of the system she so strongly opposed just tickled me to no end – most often it feels like these autocracies in fiction just get a new king. Not how Breq does it! Really enjoyed these characters – kind of happy to know there’s more in front of me!

Inventing the Renaissance – Ada Palmer – An excellent book about history, the study of history, and the history of history, thru the lens of the study of the Renaissance. Palmer is clear-eyed towards the past and tender towards the people living thru it. If you’re a little bit interested in history, this is excellent – if you’re obsessed, you’re probably going to get something out of Palmer’s examination of how history was built. There are some great approaches to history here, including a really excellent set of metaphors (ever-so-much-moreso, history lab, extensive nicknames, the focus on great minds as belonging to extremely normal human beings.) Palmer has an excellent grasp on how strange the past was, and how the people living in it were being humans in a fascinatingly different context than we are.

What I’m Reading
Feet of Clay – Terry Pratchett – My continued read-thru of the Night’s Watch thread of Discworld.

The Raven Scholar – Antonia Hodgson – At almost exactly the 50% mark, I got to an actually interesting twist.  A minor complaint – I was able to put this book down (as of yesterday) nearly a month and pick it back up again without missing any of the threads. Fortunate for me, but a sign of a repetitive style of writing that doesn’t really trust the reader to have been paying enough attention to catch all of the hints and apply them to the characters. I wish this book trusted the reader more to follow along on our own attention span – I don’t need THIS MANY reminders about who people are and how they have interacted in the past attend each mention of them. It feels like Hodgson doesn’t trust me to not have my phone out.

The Postman – David Brin – post apocalyptic story, I’m only about 5% in

What I’ll Read Next
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
More Hugos nominees 

Reading journal for Wed May 27 2026

What I’ve Read
Marae by Anonymous - https://archiveofourown.org/works/31072724 – A fascinating Star Wars prequel AU with Maul/Rex and Blade Runner influences. I recommend! The premise is that the close are not quite replicants of Blade Runner, but not unlike them – organic droids anchored to physical form with a set of memories that come from … well, spoilers. It’s great, it’s weird, it’s got a work skin that I didn’t really get to enjoy. This author was prolific but opted to leave fandom, so tho I know their name, I’m going to avoid sharing it here. Their works remain on AO3 and collected here - https://archiveofourown.org/collections/001100_00

Indexicality by Therrae aka DashaMTE - https://archiveofourown.org/works/27580219 – The final addition to the long and delightful Xenoethnography series - I should have read this when it came out about 4 years ago, and I don’t think I finished it. But by god, it was amazing and a fitting conclusion to a very long and emotionally complex series. If the word count feels daunting on this series, just start with the first one and see if it you like it – pleasures like this, you can savor.

Honorable mention for a shorter fic: Rites series by soulshrapnel – Darth Maul/Qi’ra (from the Han Solo prequel movie) https://archiveofourown.org/series/1978516 – After the new Maul: Shadow Lord cartoon, I have been interested in some fic about Maul – poking randomly thru the tags found this gem. Focusing on the new character, Qi’ra, this fic series is a fascinating look at Maul from an external perspective of a crime lord who is interested in manipulating him via sex – and, well, it works pretty well, in the short term, and has some consequences she did not expect and does not like. I felt like this fic really nailed the ways that these two extremely damaged people would create intimacy without trust via manipulation and exploitation. (I adore a touch-starved Maul, and a situation where people exploit the limited power they have.)

Isle in the Silver Sea – Tasha Suri – Sigh. I loved the elevator pitch of this book! I think it might work for others!

The story focuses on the idea that the Isle (which is explicitly a magical England) ontologically depends on the re-enactment of stories to maintain the physical reality of the nation. Our main characters, Simran and Vina, are stuck in a story that will lead to their murder-suicide. Both magical and political power constrains them to this end, unless they try to fight it.

The idea is interesting! But, the actual story lacked focus enough to be a standalone novel, and lacked space enough to be a trilogy. The end result was characters that felt, not shallow, but rushed, and a book that wasted time giving grace notes to side characters who were barely there to begin with. It vacillates between overexplaining some concepts and ignoring the mechanics of others – so the balance of setup and payoff was skewed and inconsistent.

Petty gripe: if you are going to show me a magical chalice and a guy who is definitely King Arthur with the serial numbers filed off and talk about the power of stories, at some point, you do have to address Jesus. If your story is set in a magical England and you have THE HOLY GRAIL, you do have to deal with the underlying myth of why the grail is holy. Because if Wales and Punjab exist as they do in reality, then so must Christianity!


What I’m Reading

The Raven Scholar – Static

Inventing the Renaissance – Ada Palmer – about 30% - Actually fascinating look at the Renaissance with historical details and a fun bouncy tempo. The thing I am caught up on is how foreign and insane the past was, and how well Ada Palmer explains it.

The chapter on how political patronage and the religious concept of grace both overlap in the justice system and in the religious system is fascinating – like a seeing a puzzle come together. It makes so much more sense out of things in history that felt absurd and insane when I heard about them. In a snippet, the idea of a judicial being fair and consistent was simply not a goal for these people. The idea of justice was to impose harsh penalties as a lesson about hierarchy, from which the guilty sinner/convict would be saved by the grace of their patron (human or saintly) as a display of God’s mercy. So, while many more crimes had the legal penalty of death than do today, the expectation was that a criminal would be saved from the full force of the law and given a lesser punishment as a show of their patron’s holy mercy.

What I’ll Read Next
Tomb of Dragons Katherine Addison - reread for Xing Book club
Ancillary Justice Ann Leckie for Necromancy Book Club

Hugo nominations still to read:

Novels
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Novellas
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom)
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia UK)
The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK)

What I’ve Read

Dracula by Bram Stoker – I cannot believe I failed to mention that I finished Dracula in my last post! I enjoyed it and I could absolutely see why it’s a classic, but I am gonna say – I don’t see it as being nearly as dear to me as Frankenstein. Stoker’s writing is engaging and I love that he’s so devoted to the documents and journals and letters so we can get each character’s voice. I cared, quite deeply, about each of these people. However, Stoker is so into doing each character voice that it gets honestly kind of obnoxious to read Van Helsing’s speech and writing – he’s given a Funny Foreigner Accent and it’s conveyed phonetically, so it carries into his writing in a way that undercuts his authority as a scholar. Also, the book got aggressively religious in the last third as Mina gets progressively more vampirized, and it feels repetitious. Jonathan’s fierce love of her redeems a great deal! Not all. But, overall, compared to the beginning, the ending of the book felt rushed and nowhere near as loved. Dracula, the character, had completely disappeared from the novel, in pursuit of Dracula the monster, and the death blow felt like a fizzle. If you want to have a fun little side quest, look up all the phrenologists that Stoker lists in here by name.

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu – I read this after Dracula because a friend pointed out that Carmilla predates Dracula, and it seemed like a short read. Highly recommend – no one is kidding about the lesbian subtext; the book burns with it! The commonalities between Carmilla and Dracula are already subject of better minds than mine, but I do feel like Stoker improved on one element – grafted on the historical Vlad Tepes Dracula makes for a far more engaging fake aristocratic background than the one created whole cloth for Carmilla. I also see the same element of the Character of Carmilla disappearing inside the Monster Carmilla once the vampiric nature is revealed. It’s quaint and charming and worth a read!

The Everlasting by Alix E Harrow – Adored this book. Told from the first person, the main character is absolutely the kind of specific voice that renders the particular themes of the book most clear – when the author makes this kind of structural choice for their book, they are already working from such a point of strength! The main voice of the book is a soldier whose complicated relationship with patriotism and fealty wend their way into his scholarship of his country’s founding myth, and what it means for the warrior heroine of his country’s darkest hour to have been a real person who bled and wept and wanted nothing more than to stop killing people. Excellent book, go in spoiler free if you can. This book was so good and so specifically *for me* that it is actually making it challenging to read books that are too similar because I keep wishing I were re-reading this.

Platform Decay by Martha Wells – Murderbot Diaries #8 – Hm. I liked this fine. I think there was an element of emotional growth for Murderbot that felt…. A bit too on the nose. A bit too close to home. I often love narratives where an imperfect victim of neglect is allowed to be a bit rough and a bit messy and make some mistakes, and this is not NOT that. But it’s possible that Murderbot is perhaps becoming more mentally healthy than me, and I feel weird about that. The plot is solid, if nothing particularly new for Murderbot. I really liked Three getting some sidequests and fucking them up in new and delightful ways.

What I’m Reading
The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgeson – I’m trying to not compare everything that is vaguely magical and monarchical to The Everlasting, but, well, it was a good book, and good books have a long hangover! I am also trying to not compare this to the Tensorate Series by Neon Yang. But. Well. I don’t dislike it, either on a sentence or paragraph or chapter level- I am waiting to see how the book comes together before I finally judge it. But – I am trying to NOT read into the book more Asian-coding than it actually calls for, and I’m failing? It feels like a Pan-Asian restaurant, rather than a specific era and time with a specific understanding of itself, and that’s not necessarily a flaw! Good characters so far, and I’m not even a third in.

The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri – This, unfortunately, I really did have to set aside for when I’m in a more charitable mood. I found myself quibbling with sentences and pacing and paragraphs and that no way to read a book. It’s working on some themes similar to The Everlasting, and I loved that book immediately and this one deserves a fair shake on its own terms.

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer - Audiobook – Excellent! Hugo nominated. Funny and informative and charming. I am even getting over the unexpectedly English narrator. (Seriously, why.)

Ancient Magus’s Bride Vol 4 – On hold for now, I have lost some oomph but I will come back to it.

Code Switching by Therrae – I picked this up to re-read because the series is the most unlike the Everlasting I could think of while still fitting my current mood.

What I’ll Read Next
Tomb of Dragons Katherine Addison - reread for Xing Book club
Ancillary Justice Ann Leckie for Necromancy Book Club

Hugo nominations still to read:

Novels
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Novellas
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom)
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia UK)
The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK)

General life of a reader update: I have finally purchased an e-reader outside the Amazon environment, just in time for Amazon to stop supporting my oldest living Kindle. (RIP, first Kindle, we hardly knew ye.) So, I get to try out the wonderful world of Kindle jailbreaking (so far, so good) and then I get to try to put KOReader on it! I have two Paperwhites currently – only one is getting nuked in Amazon’s upcoming changes – But if the process works on the older one, I might do the second. What a luxurious thought, to have multiple functional e-readers at once!

Also a great update for e-reader users: Jo Walton has a fun article about using her e-reader to keep up with her insanely prolific reading habits. https://reactormag.com/how-to-read-sixteen-books-at-once-at-all-times/

And I also found this very pleasant discussion from 2014 about how her e-reader changed her reading habits overall. - https://reactormag.com/how-having-an-e-reader-has-changed-my-reading-habits/


What I’ve Read
Chalice by Robin McKinley – This reads like the literary version of a fairy tale that I had just never heard of. But it’s entirely original and I think this is the pure distilled form of McKinley’s charm – a thoughtful and intelligent woman who becomes powerful thru her devotion to others, and a magically untouchable man who is worth her devotion, made touchable. This is a pure example of the trope of “the virtue of the king is the virtue of the land” except, you know, made a bit more modern and it’s more focused on women. It’s honestly great.

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel – This is a great book for just about anyone – I read it knowing a fair bit about certain kinds of textiles (both from a New England elementary education and because of Elizabeth Gaskill) and that got expanded on and refined. I adored the discussions about how trade in textiles shaped so much of global commerce. Postrel does not shy away from how awful that can be (chattel slavery and cotton go hand in hand for a reason), nor does she allow it to dehumanize the people engaged in it. It’s honestly a great work that covers a vast span of time and culture – I would be glad to read more from her.

The Invasion (Animorphs #1) by KA Applegate – I picked this up after one more Tumblr post talking about the book series’ respect for the reader and attention to the cost of war. It turns out to be just as good as I remembered, and written simply enough for the age I was when I first read them. (I picked up the first book at the Scholastic Book Fair because it has a lizard on it. On such small wheels our destinies turn.) This book has to do a fair bit of the scifi heavy lifting, introducing the human cast, the aliens, setting the stakes of the intergalactic espionage that is the main conflict, and establishing how the key technology (morphing an animal based on a DNA sample) works. The writing is clear and respects the audience – when people die, they die, but the characters also feel the age of the middle schoolers they are. I’m planning on doing a re-read/read thru and finishing the whole series, which I had bored of as a child as I grew out of the age group. I think that I’d like to see if the resolution is as interesting as the Tumblr Animorphs fans make it out to be.

Cultural Exchange and Comparative Semiotics (Xenoethnography #1 & #2) by Therrae (Dasha_mte) A re-read. Anthropologist works with Transformers, lovely.

Concubine by Kaasknot – Technically an MCU fic, in that it’s an AU of the version of Thor and Loki from those movies, but mostly unrelated and pulls more from the Poetic Edda. Arranged marriage between Loki, who grew up a runt prince on Jotunheim, and Thor, the spoiled prince of Asgard who has no love for his new concubine, leads to Loki isolated as the unofficial ambassador to Asgard. I wanted to like this more than I did. In short, this is doing court intrigue and politics and war, but like, in a boring way that makes Loki look dumb. Things work out in his favor when it would be more interesting to see them blow up in his face. The balance of self-indulgence v. complexity wavers too wildly for me to have sunk my emotional investment into either pole. Bah. 140K words and I kept waiting for it to get really good, and since I waited like ten years to actually read this, I feel a bit meh about it. 

What I’m Reading
The Stars are Legion – Kameron Hurley. Picked up an audiobook based on a Tumblr post where someone had pointed our that it was amazing that this book’s reputation had managed to avoid controversy, given that it has zero male characters. Which, given that its about space wars and technology based on biological ships with squishy organs and vehicles that are also animals, I am so here for.

The Visitor (Animorphs #2) KA Applegate – This book’s got a Rachel POV and she’s not as confident as she seems. The book is also doing the kind of fatphobia of the 90s where they don’t even notice the fatphobia, but, well, I lived thru it once – it can hardly do more damage now.

What I’ll Read Next
My book clubs are on books I have not read! (Amazing work, y’all.)

SciFi/Fantasy Book Club
Sunshine Robin McKinley
Tomb of Dragons Katherine Addison

Necromancy Book Club
The Everlasting Alix E. Harrow
The Isle in the Silver Sea Tasha Suri
Platform Decay (murderbot 8) Martha Wells
Ancillary Justice Ann Leckie

I mentally still have a pin in my planned read thru of LeGuin's Earthsea books, and a friend was interested in doing a read thru of the Baru Cormorant Trilogy.... 

Personal update: I have indulged – I got a Kobo ereader to replace my somewhat elderly Kindle Paperwhite. It has BUTTONS - actual, physical buttons! It’s so nice and the lighting is good, and I am at last free from the Amazon ecosystem. On the downside, a good deal of the fic that I have saved for myself the last few years in ebook form was transmitted to the Kindle as emailed attachments, and so I have a new part time job of saving and converting all of those and sending them to the Kobo.

What I’ve Read
Gaudy Night – Dorothy Sayers – I finished this slowly, in writing, and I am glad I took the time. This book is a wonderful summation of the series, giving space for Harriet’s introspection and allowing her to slowly come to terms with her own growing trust in her own judgment. It’s full of allusion, jokes, and self-reflection. I often fall back on the metaphor of fiction as light striking a jewel – a skilled writer can draw out subtle meanings and highlight contrast by what facets are lit by the writer’s attention.  By the end of this book both Harriet and Peter are illuminated. Wonderful book, glad I decided to give the series a proper and slow read-thru rather than just goof around.

Sidebar: I have an exacting requirement about English writers, which is that I want them to show their work – I want to see them thinking about what it means To Be English in their works, rather than taking their Englishness for a universal and inevitable norm, like gravity or light. In the case of Sayers, it often takes the form of thinking about time, about changes, about class, about academics, about social roles, about dignity and decency and what is or is not “done.” This book makes me see a vision of Oxford as Harriet Vane loved it, and I think that’s very worthwhile.

Busman’s Honeymoon – Dorothy Sayers – I am glad I picked this up so soon after Gaudy Night! They are very close in time. This book is fascinating because the beginning frame is an epistolary section from Peter and Harriet’s friends and family about how happy they are to see them married, the middle of the book starts as a sort of cozy “murder in a locked cottage” mystery, and then the ending is a gradual examination of what it costs Peter, as a human being, to send another person to be tried and executed for their crimes. It’s book about marriage, and figuring out how to be in a life together with someone else, with all their scars and foibles, and how to do it honorably, without pulling them into being your plaything. It’s moderately incredible and also tonally complex in a way that Sayers’s earlier detective novels just wasn’t. Honestly, great and nothing like I was expecting.

The Orb of Cairado by Katherine Addison – I didn’t know this was a murder mystery, and I think that works because the main character didn’t know either, until he was well into it. It’s short and sweet and mostly complete, and delves into a bit of the social reaction to the reign of Emperor Edrehasivar VII aka, Maia the protagonist of the first novel in this series. Orb does not stand up on its own without that book, and I suspect it does not stand up without the Witness for the Dead novels, and since I have read all of those multiple times, I don’t mind. I am not sure if this book is a cash grab from Addison or an attempt at a palette cleanser, but I can't tell if its successful because I can't tell why she wanted to write it. I also don’t think it holds up well against Sayers (unfair comparison, who could??) and I would not have read them so close together if I had known it was a murder mystery. 

Sidebar: This is the third time Addison/Monette has linked being a gay man with murder, that I know of. I rather wish she were a little inclined to ponder if there’s something there, there.

Honorable mention – not a novel, but this excellent fic based in Much Ado About Nothing made me very happy – Reprise by Perennial - https://archiveofourown.org/works/26980378


What I’m Reading
The Fabric of Civilization – Virginia Postrel. The deeper we get into this book, the more interested and niche the information gets. I had some background in textile history – New England children all get a visit to a fabric mill and a maple sugar shack as mandatory field trips, and we also got a background in the Bread and Roses textile workers' strikes in school – so I think I am perhaps unusually versed for the average person on the history of textiles up to and immediately into the 1800s. That said, this was the first time someone really explained the mechanism that punch cards looms DO to make the punch cards impact the cloth, and that alone was worth the price of admission. I was listening to the audiobook but switched to the digital text when I realized I was missing the PICTURES.

What I’ll Read Next
Sunshine (Robin McKinley, a re-read)
Catching Fire

Knitting reflections – I just got the notice that the next Sock Madness pattern is a heel-up pattern, not unlike the Hyrde Sokker I recently did for fun. https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/hyrde-sokker I really enjoy this style of heel-up, in the round sock, as I find it has a comfy padded heel and a high instep without too much fussing. My first pair were these Nordwand socks, one of the few times I am pleased I was briefly on TikTok. https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/nordwand-socksI’m kicking doing this round just because I do actually want these socks for my own. https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/whisky-ahoi

I am keyboardless, forgive my brevity.

What I've Read

After the Storm by perennial - This beautiful fic is Don John and Hero from Much Ado About Nothing, in an alternate universe where John revenges himself on Claudio by marrying Hero. Long and slow, this fic look at who John might be if given enough rope, and who Hero might be if she didn't have to marry that credulous shithead.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/31038242

Swordheart by T. Kingfisher A sweet romance, a little too long. Doing some lifting to set up the following books in the series.

The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison - A reread for me for xing bookclub!

What I'm Reading Now
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - This is fine? Not sure if I am reaching for the orientalism or if the book is just doing that, but the key problems are repetition and repetition. 700 pages of, Dracula is around still and he's a dick.

What I'll Read Next
My Real Children Jo walton

What I’ve Read
The Last Graduate – Naomi Novik – Book 2 of the Scholomance – This series rules. In some ways, total wish fulfillment (of the Superman, “What if you had the power to save everyone*?” variety) and yet the execution really works for me. And, as all good series do, it delivers on promises made in the first book that you didn’t even know were being set up. I have only read this series once, each book as it was published, and I am happily reporting that they are even better read in quick succession. I love El Higgins and would go to war for her. 

What I’m Reading
Apparently Sir Cameron Needs to Die – Static.

The Golden Enclaves – Naomi Novik – Scholomance 3 – Stuff gets objectively better and also subjectively so much worse. Fascinating expansion from the microcosm of the Scholomance itself and its limited borders to the actual whole world of magical people all fucking about and being human. Great stuff.

What I’ll Read Next
My Real Children Jo Walton
Sunshine Robin McKinley

Work in Progress Wednesday
Sock Madness 20 ! Nearly done with Sock 1, have worked out enough of the difficulties that I think sock 2 will be a great improvement! The rough part of Sock Madness is that I don’t usually have time to fit the sock to my own foot very well, so I’m probably going to have to play Cinderella with someone else’s feet.