Other Ever Afters

Melanie Gillman's Other Ever Afters is a cute collection of graphic short stories. Maybe fables? They are not as heavy-handed as traditional fables, and they center feelings and belonging. The back copy describes the book as "original, feminist, queer fairy tales" but the queerness is a light touch because they are fairy tales, so the important bits are things like "there is a giant outside our village" and "the goose-keeper lives outside the castle". The drawings are bright and softly round-edged and lovely.

It's overall cute, and a quick little collection of stories.

This post's theme word is pussivant (v. intr.), "to meddle, fuss, move around busily." The villagers pussivanted around the square in an attempt to find the yearly sacrificial maiden.

The Mere Wife

I adored Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf and was curious to read her earlier novel, The Mere Wife, which draws on the story of Beowulf. In several reviews I see that The Mere Wife has been described as a "modern retelling" of Beowulf from womens' perspectives; to me, the entire book was vague and ethereal in its storytelling, so I could not be sure that it was "modern", as opposed to simply a different setting with more glass windows and trains than are strictly described in Beowulf.

The setting begins with a vagueness about the specifics of Dana Mills --- what year is it? what middle-eastern country is she a soldier in? is this meant to be modern reality or just to draw on elements of modernity? --- and the book never provides answers or clues or these questions. How did she come to be pregnant? If she is realistically hungry and afraid of starving and being attacked by other humans, then how did she manage to give birth alone (to Grendel) in an abandoned train tunnel, with no apparent difficulties? Probably I read this book in the wrong frame of mind, as I kept trying to puzzle out these logistics even though the prose flowed poetically and only suggested the shape of descriptions, durations, feelings, logical connections.

Some of the vagueness comes from details and story explorations beyond Beowulf. Parts of the book focus on Willa, the wife of Roger Herot, son of the founder of (planned and gated community) Herot Hall. In the Willa chapters, the vagueness and dissociation of the prose seemed to be a reflection of her isolation and emotional coldness, and the ways in which her expected role limited her freedom of movement, dress, what to eat, how to act, what to say. This was effective and skillful writing but I found myself looking for a moral, or a scrap of redemption, or even a suggestion of feminism and empowerment. This left me feeling as cold as Willa, and it seemed like the story had been written --- or perhaps constrained by the original Beowulf --- to close all avenues of imagining a different or better life for the women of the community.

And on occasion, the women got first-person-plural chapters to spin their own mythology directly to the reader. Chapter 21 is only 3 pages long  (pp 153-155). It begins "Hark! We slap the bell on the front desk of the police station." This is deliciously close to the structure of some more traditional translations of Beowulf and I appreciated that. This perspective is delivered in first-person-plural, from the perspective of the nameless and amorphous group of neighborhood women. "There's a long tradition that says women gossip, when in fact women are the memory of the world. We keep the family trees and the baby books. We manage the milk teeth. We keep the census of diseases, the records of divorces, battles, and medals. We witness the wills. We wash the weddings out of the bedsheets." (page 153-154) This is delightfully close to Alice Frasier's repeated joke (paraphrased from memory): "History is a record of what men do while women are busy maintaining civilization by keeping everyone fed, clean, healthy, and alive." Frasier's original is more pithy.

Chapter 21 ends, "We will not surrender. We will not back down. Soon, soon, the mountain will be covered with men in uniforms, hounds, cars moving fast, people telling and yelling. Soon, soon, we will have what is ours." (pp 155) Sinister, creepy, skin-tingling, excellent. The follow-up chapter 29 uses the same creepy first-person-plural telling and reframing of the entire story, and ends (pp 206), "We're the ones who make the world, the warriors who stand watch, the women on whose wrong side you would not want to walk. What do you get the women who have everything? You get them more."

Contrast this with Dana's perspective, late in the book (pp 212-213), "Who's the monster now? ... No one even looks at me. You don't really own anything. Nothing is yours forever, not your body, not your youth, not even your mind." Her perspective is grim and dismal throughout, even when contemplating how to care for her son. "Here's the truth of the world, here it is. You're never everything anyone else wants. In the end, it's going to be you, all alone on a mountain, or you, all alone, in a hospital room. Love isn't enough, and you do it anyway. Love isn't enough, and it's still this thing that everyone wants. I see what he wants. I know him better than I know myself. I know his whole history, and I don't know my own."

The coldness of the chorus of women is a sinister weight that oppresses both Dana and Willa and drives the story on to the bloody conclusion of Beowulf (pp 268):

We question Willa. She tells us that Dana Mills is back and Ben Woolf is deranged, and we believe her. Murderer not dead? Check. Monster not slain? Check. Hero not heroic? Check. 

We take over. 

Everyone thinks all we've been doing, for thirty years, is planting award-winning begonias. It's always the mothers who are hated. The fathers are too far away, home at 5:30, off the train, perfume on their jackets. The mothers are the clay pigeons children want to shoot out of the sky. Imagine being a target for fifty years, from your moments of first nubility to moments of humility, when your skin feels like paper and you stop sleeping forever, unacknowledged as being the armed guard of civilization.

Creepy and overwhelming.

Overall this was a weird one. Familiarity with Beowulf made me keep looking for clues and connections, differences and editorial decisions. This was at odds with the tone of the book, which was more of an ungrounded meditation on women's feelings of pressure and social isolation. If I were looking for a book that focused on a character secondary to the main plotline, I would prefer to reread Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, which is vague but gives clues about a substantive plotline (and has more sarcasm and female characters who are allowed personal agency).

This post's theme word is proscription (n), "a prohibition or the act of prohibiting." Eating more calories was not proscribed, and yet every housewife avoided it and policed her peers to enforce the unstated limits.

Galaxy: The Prettiest Star

Galaxy: The Prettiest Star is a graphic novel by Jadzia Axelrod and Jess Taylor. It's a joyful, colorful celebration of lines and active drawings; also, incidentally, it is a metaphor for trans-ness. The main character is a vivid alien princess, in disguise as a normal human highschool-age boy. There is also a playful supervisory robot corgi.

The story explores attempts to blend in at high school, experimenting with self-presentation, the malleability of friendships and social pressure and how high school feels very high-stakes. Plus there is a charming corgi! (I've recently met a corgi puppy who lives a few blocks away and is a charming ball of energy.)

The story is straightforward works really nicely. It holds up for me as a way to discuss masking, coming out, being yourself, and transition. Always feeling watched and surveilled on personal presentation. Some parts are definitely fantasy and I was left bemusedly trying to figure out if anything lined up with the secret radio transmissions, or the eternal space war.

This post's theme word is reck (n), "care or concern." The entire basketball team had little reck for the prom night dancing kerfuffle.

Howl's Moving Castle

Diana Wynne Jones' novel Howl's Moving Castle is a fun fantasy novel. It was adapted into an animated Mikazaki film but the adaptation changed many of the text-rendered delights of the story. The book sidles up to a sort of genre-savvy knowledge about fantasy stories. Protagonist Sophie is the eldest of three daughters, so she inherently understands that any choice she makes will go wrong in order to better frame the improved choices of her younger sisters; the youngest, of course, will make the best choice of all and have great fortune in life. Sophie understands everything in her life in this light --- working in the family hat shop, living in a provincial town, avoiding the maidens'-heart-devouring wizard Howl whose wandering castle emits puffs of steam as it haunts the fields outside her town.

The narrative voice here is joyful, and Jones is a master. (I read this book after having it strongly recommended, years ago, and that recommendation absolutely holds up!) All narration is in limited third-person and we mostly follow Sophie, but the reader is allowed to witness and notice things like hints being dropped and then named as hints by other characters in the scene, or Sophie's own magic which she denies having but frequently uses. The biggest and most fantastic reveal is (spoiler) that the wizard Howl, whose actions seem disjointed, fickle, and mysterious to Sophie, is actually a 27-year-old Welsh grad student who escaped into this fantasy world to (probably) avoid defending his thesis. I admit I filled in some of that invention, but most of it is actually right there in the novel.

This was a quick read and I'd recommend it. My edition had some Q&A with the author in the endnotes, which only increased my enjoyment of the story.

This post's theme word is hierophant (n), "an interpreter of esoteric knowledge." The skills of a wizard and a Ph. D. student are both obtained from close study with a hierophant and years of diligent work.

Charmed Life

Diana Wynne Jones' Charmed Life is a children's fantasy book (apparently it is chronologically the third in a series of six! although it was the first published and is the recommended entry point).

This book is a joyful play on common children's fantasy ideas. The protagonists are a sister and brother, orphaned in the first few pages, and we follow them on their next steps. Gwendolen is a gifted witch, whose future is foretold to bring her great power, and she drags her magic-less little brother Eric along with her as she takes determined steps towards her destiny. She is stymied by the usual barriers: orphans have no adults advocating for them, magic is hard to learn, and the adult world runs on opaque and mysterious rules that children must obey (or discover by transgressing and being punished).

I came to the story with the usual Grown-Up Fantasy Genre Questions: how does magic work? how does one learn? what are the rules? ... and I was delighted that all of these questions were absolutely diversions from the way the story wanted to go! Gwendolen is a bit stubborn and direct --- as are many girl protagonists --- but when facing punishment from adults, things went completely off the rails and my expectations were entirely subverted.

A quick read, suitable for many ages, and cheery. Recommended to me, and I pass along this recommendation to others.

This post's theme words and contexts come from the novel:

• limbeck (n), "an apparatus used in distillation." One table was crowded with torts and limbecks, some bubbling, some empty. (page 88)
• cresset (n), "an iron vessel or basket used for holding an illuminant and mounted as a torch or suspended as a lantern." The cresset was out. The torts and limbecks and other vessels were all clean. (p 219)

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

 The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is N. K. Jemisin's debut novel. The fantasy novel setting features a large empire where gods are real, personified beings that it is possible to interact with. The protagonist is suddenly bumped up from an estranged-former-heir-to-a-throne to a politically-relevant-yokel-swept-to-the-capital and has to navigate all new relationships, power structures, politics, alliances, and so on.

The book was good (I read it awhile ago) but not enough of a draw that I continued to read the rest of the trilogy. I really loved this author's Broken Earth trilogy (previously 1, 2, 3) and recommend those books as very emotionally powerful and a really interesting fantasy world.

This post's theme word is hyaline (adj), "like glass; transparent or translucent." This post displays my hyaline intent to work through my tall to-be-read and to-be-blogged stacks of books.

Fine Structure

Fine Structure is a scifi novel by author qntm. It starts in the present day with some physicists constructing an experiment to test their new theory. So far so good! Unfortunately for them, their theory is correct. Except that every time the test shows their theory works, the fundamental laws of the universe change so that the experiment (and the effect and the theory itself!) is not reproducible.

Scientific reproducibility turns out to be a minor concern among the other issues this creates.

This is a very cool premise, and the entire novel is full of very cool science-fiction ideas. The narrative style, however, jumps around between different storylines and timeframes in a way that I found completely removed the stakes from the story. (Spoiler: there's no tension in the current high-stakes chase scene if I've already seen a future scene where these characters are alive and fine, and everyone else is gone.) At some point I also realized that none of the characters was sympathetic or interesting, as characters --- the author is basically moving them around like puzzle-pieces in order to get to the parts of the story where the cool scifi idea can happen.

Quite late in the novel I was wondering "why did this end up in my TBR stack?" and suddenly there was a paragraph about antimemetics and realized that this must be linked to SCP (previously).

I'd recommend this for vacation reading but the lack of characterization meant that it was missing some depth my brain kept looking for.

This post's theme word is fulgent (adj), "shining brightly; radiant." The prose aims to be fulgent and lands somewhere around "thesaurus explosion" for the most abstract scenes.

Spear

Nicola Griffith's Spear is a short, fascinating novella that retells a side quest legend in the Arthurian constellation of stories and characters.

It's lovely. The prose is gorgeous, as always from this author. The main character is a woman who gets to make her own choices and have skills and an identity as an individual, which is the kind of detail I wish I didn't have to highlight but I'm glad to see.

Just as with Hild, this book included certain details of daily life and choices that stayed with me. It's raining and two knights are escorting through the woods? One must offer to go hoodless, for the peripheral awareness. Is magic real or is it just cultural significance and placebo suggestions? I loved this, and it was a brief and delicious read.

(I was left with the impression that I missed significant plot choices and story details because I'm not familiar enough with Arthurian legends and lore. That's okay, the book was great anyway.)

This post's theme word is evanescent (adj), "fading quickly; transitory." The evanescent details of lore dimmed beneath the onslaught of accrued cultural Arthurian baggage.

There is no antimemetics division

There is no antimemetics division is a novel / series of short stories / piece of collaborative fiction authored by qntm. The entire work is readable for free online. It is vaguely unsettling horror --- not my usual preference --- but excellently written and with a compelling premise.

There is no antimemetics division lives inside SCP, a huge online collaborative fiction site loosely based around a single fictional prompt and set in roughly the same universe. If you read widely on the SCP site, you will eventually find some mutually-incompatible storylines; these are explicable under the premise of the universe: the site documents a sort of parallel reality (or is it) where certain ideas have the power to erase themselves from your memory. These are "antimemes", and they can propagate just like memes but are much more difficult to secure, contain, and protect against (SCP).

I don't usually enjoy horror, but this novel and the SCP project more widely are very gentle about the horror angle. If you go looking to be scared, you can find that --- but there are also storylines that are 100% playing the premise for comedic value, entire stories based around one pun punchline, and nudge-nudge-wink-wink stories that play with the tropes of horror joyfully. Spending many hours reading this novel, and various other SCP works, convinced me that I'm actually OK with horror, as long as it is psychological and interspersed with jokes. SCP is more like Jasper Fforde's sense of humor, melted with Peter Watts' attitude and then forced to write exclusively in the format of bureaucratic filing reports.

Rereading the above, my opinion might not be clear. I'm trying to be descriptive. 

I strongly recommend There is no antimemetics division. Try the first few chapters and see if they scratch a particular brain itch for you, as they did for me. If you like the premise, then I hope you've already read Peter Watts' Blindsight (GO READ IT RIGHT NOW, it remains my #1 most-recommended-to-others book).

This post's theme word is descript (adj), "having distinctive features or qualities." This novel made me much more cognizant of the aggressively descript and nondescript elements of my environment.

Jhereg

Stephen Brust's Jhereg jumped to the top of the TBR queue because of Cory Doctorow's strong recommendation. It didn't hit any sweet spots for me: it was a quick ~230 pages of fantasy, told in first-person by an assassin, in a fantasy world with sorcery and witchcraft and Dragaerans (descriptions render these more human than the name would suggest). There were action sequences and preparation scenes and scheming and thousand-year internecine feuds. No plot twists were surprising, although the narration chose at many points to casually reveal things that shifted the entire world-building operation (for example, at one point --- and this is not much of a spoiler --- it is revealed that death is not particularly permanent, and in fact is just a way of sending a snippy message to your enemies).

I might read the next book in the series, but it's low-priority. There's a new Jasper Fforde book out! And I still haven't read the sequel to Hild!

This post's theme word is gegg (v intr / noun), "to play a hoax or practical joke; a trick or practical joke." In a world where magic is a daily practice, there is a breadth of possible geggs.

If you were a superhero, what power would you have?

 I take attendance by having students answer a question. Previously 2017, 2019.

If you were a superhero, what power would you have?

There were some traditionalists:

• invisibility x7
• flying x3
• super speed x2
• telepathy
• read minds 
• invulnerability
• super saiyan

Many people want extra time:

• have 48 hours a day
• stop time
• no longer need to sleep
• not getting sleepy
• making [other student in class] on time
• instant transportation

Then there were people who imagined powers that help towards other goals:

• power to refill anything
• memory
• infinite memory
• infinite money

This post's theme word is macrosmatic (adj), "having a well-developed sense of smell." The macrosmatic superhero rescues local residents from inadequately-aged cheese.

What parallel-universe version of yourself would you like to be?

 I take attendance by having students answer a question.

What parallel-universe version of yourself would you like to be?

(all typos below are preserved as submitted)

Many students aspire to parallel-universe careers:

• pilot (x2)
• POTUS
• president
• economist
• lawyer
• chef
• cheffe
• astronaut (x2)
• commentator

Some wanted careers based on fame (mostly sports):

• PGA tour champ
• pop star
• win the masters
• dancer
• actress/dancer
• pro sport of some sort
• disc golfer

One single student wanted simply more money, in an amount I have not heard of:

• a bizzlionaire

One student wanted to be an inexplicable parallel-universe version, no further explanation:

a cold one

Some students were nonspecific but positive:

• living in nature
• maybe in bed

Some students were simply nonspecific:

• huh
• idk

And this week's most contented mid-semester student picked simply:

• idk I'm happy in this one

This post's theme word is lotic (adj), "relating to or living in flowing water." (Note that "lentic" is the same, but for still water.) The lotic parallel universe features many gills and a lot of waterproofing on electronics, but is otherwise quite familiar. There are a lot of reunions of the lotic and lentic branches of the family.

Wolfwalkers

 Wolfwalkers is an animated film from the same director as The Secret of Kells. It has a similar sort of art and line style, with movements easily flowing across the screen in a way I found very aesthetically pleasing. You can read the plot summary on Wikipedia, so I'll just give some viewing notes:

If possible, you should view this on a bedsheet in a neighbor's backyard.

Cover your delicious blood with skin, and cover that with clothing, then bugspray. (You will still be bitten on the face, and hands, and through your socks. This is the destiny of the delicious. Your itchy discomfort will be offset by the bug-free experience of neighbor kids.)

At the appropriate time --- and trust me, you will know the appropriate time --- you should absolutely howl along with the onscreen wolves. Everyone else, on their lawn chairs and picnic blankets, will absolutely do this, especially if < 7 years old.

Five stars, highly recommended. Not entirely historically-accurate.

This post's theme word is eidolon (n), "an idealized form" or "a phantom". The animation smoothly showed transition between physical humans, eidolon scents and spirits, and wolves.

A Deadly Education

Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education is the reasonable, correct, logical sort of magical boarding school novel, which has considered the implications of magic, and childhood development, and boarding schools, and societal systems, and wants to lure you in to considering these things, too.

The overall premise is this: magic is real, and only some people can use it. (Standard so far.) The use of magic, and even merely the access to magic, draws magical predators, who are varied and horrifying and want to consume magicians --- but of course, adult wizards are in control of their magic and strong and so their creamy, gooey center is well-guarded and hard to predate. Adolescent wizards, though, are just growing in to their magical powers, and so are relatively easier to devour, plus they are not as good at hiding themselves or defending themselves.

Given these stakes, surviving to adulthood is unlikely. So the magical community built a giant fortress-cum-boarding school (located in the UK of course) which is hard (but not impossible) to attack. Unlike the Harry Potter-verse where students are whisked into a world of whimsy when they turn 11, kids in this world are unwillingly teleported at age 11 to inside the school if they are lucky enough to receive a seat. (The unlucky try to survive pubescence outside the school and generally... don't.) The school contains no adults and runs on eldritch machinery, slightly broken and haphazard since it has been impossible to service. Upon graduation, the class of 18-year-olds (who lived through years of attrition-by-monster inside the school) are forced to fight their way out through all the too-big-to-sneak-inside monsters, who have been waiting outside all year to eat them.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of them also don't survive.

But overall, the odds of surviving to adulthood are better (but still horrible) if you attend the school than if you don't.

This was a really great read (I consumed it in one day!), and the slow reveal, through the narrator's sarcasm, of the delicate details of the world was fascinating and terrible. Our narrator is a 17-yo social outcast, trying to keep her head down to avoid the ire of the popular kids but still have enough loose social connections that no one feeds her to a monster in her sleep. This is a boarding school where the usual social pressures and uncomfortable alliances of puberty are writ large: whether you have a buddy to watch your back as you brush your teeth is the difference between life and death. Every day. Every student is stressed and tired (not to mention vitamin-D-deficient and undernourished), and on top of that they are all, continuously, furiously studying magic to try to level up in time to survive. There are the usual dramas (good vs evil magic, disastrous teen flirtation, who sits at which lunch table, rooms and staircases moving around unpredictably) and some completely delightful unexpected ones (the school automagically sets your lessons, so if you get uppity it gives you harder assignments; "no one wants to be in honors classes... the school puts you in them against your will" p. 96)

The writing was great, the characters had depth and were interesting, I was not sure what would happen next, and the twists and turns of the plot felt legitimate and also incredibly catchy. I am still thinking about the choices that were made, and the ones that still remain in the future. As soon as I put the book down --- that last sentence! aaaiiiieee! --- I looked up the release date of the next book. I now impatiently await.

Highly recommended.

This post's theme word is urticaceous (adj), "relating to a nettle; stinging." Immediate identification and distinguishing between lethal and merely dangerous urticaceous growths from the dormitory ceiling is a mandatory survival skill.

Sabriel

Garth Nix's Sabriel is a YA fantasy novel; it came to me highly recommended so I will summarize reasons why, reading it in 2020 as certainly an adult, I did not like it and don't recommend it. I don't mean to cast aspersions on youthful readers who enjoyed the book, but it has... issues.

Nominally, it is about a teenage girl who has magical gifts that allow her to enter the realm of Death and, variously, make things more permanently dead or bring them sort-of back to life. That's all you need to know.

The book is going through puberty SO HARD RIGHT NOW

This is my conclusion based on the nails-on-blackboard effect of unwelcome pubescent interjections into the otherwise adventure- and magic-based narrative.

We learn that because "there was minimal sex education" and "None of Sabriel's friends had reached puberty before her, so in fear and desperation she had entered Death" (17%) which seems a pretty dire thing to do in lieu of, I don't know, borrowing a book from the library or walking in to town and asking some responsible-looking adults about it. This is a truly horrible fantasy-world characterization of sex education, general education, learning, curiosity, puberty, and how serious necromantic magic is. Every single time that she enters Death it is given the stakes that she might die ("For Sabriel to enter Death seemed madness, temping fate." 66%), so I HOPE there is literally any other recourse to getting information about puberty.

The descriptions of the glaringly obvious romantic interest start with him being discovered, fully nude. The circumcision status of his penis is described; my personal reading notes say "this had better be significant later". (NARRATOR: It was not.) Later we get to hear about how his thighs are so muscled that he cannot put on pants. Even later we are treated to a gratuitous description of his rippling abs --- under his clothes --- during a fight scene.

Then for the rest of the book we just hear about people getting "flushed" and, occasionally, kissing each other on the forehead or sneakily intertwining pinkies to hold hands. It's as if the narration wants to be erotic, but is constrained by the imagination of a not-particularly-well-read 10-year-old. (They do kiss at least one time in order to COUNTERACT THE MOST POWERFUL DEATH-MAGIC THAT EXISTS IN THE WORLD; one teenage kiss is apparently sufficient, suggesting that the true magic is horniness.)

Everyone is constantly running, and extremely exhausted, but somehow manages to run even harder than before

This did not work to heighten the stakes any of the times it was used. It did heighten my irritation. After discovering previously-unbelievable athletic depth after the last handful of times that they were so-exhausted-they-could-run-no-further, why would I now feel any tension at the mention that they are so-exhausted-they-could-run-no-further? If anything, it just alerted me that they would, in fact, be required to run a bit further, because: drama.

Forced bathing scenes

At least twice, we have to read meticulously-detailed descriptions of scenes where Sabriel is forcibly stripped and bathed. This was uncomfortable and served no purpose except to repeatedly detail that it happened --- we don't even get any internal monologue or self-reflection to justify it. Yikes.

Unpalatable writing style

• Every single character was blindingly Obviously Significant to the Plot.
• The bad guy's name is a good guy's name, reversed --- oh, wow, it turns out they are the same person after hundreds of years of sinister magic!
• Sabriel has read the obviously significant Book of the Dead but can't remember pages from it except under duress in situations where suddenly magically remembering a page of a book would solve the problem; this is true even though she is literally carrying the book with her for most of the adventure.
• Putting earrings into already-pierced ears is an action that is described as causing bloody smears all over the ear-region (personal reading note: "not how earrings work").
• The characters, even those whose inner thoughts we got to hear, were extremely boring and flat, with no actual personality. First impressions and stereotypes were 100% accurate.
• There were two consecutive chapters where characters had to narrative-dump the entire plan of Team Evil Kill Everything And Live In Zombieland AND the entire plan to countermand it by Team Good, Chaste, and Hand-Holding. This despite the fact that the entire plot had been signposted SO HARD in every other clue and revelation for the entire book. Youthful readers are smart and I felt condescended-to on behalf of literate preteens everywhere.

At one point during some completely unjustified anger at the father she has literally spent 70% of the book questing to rescue, we read "He hardly seemed to notice her, except as a repository for numerous revelations and as an agent to deal with [Bad Guy]." (73%) My personal notes read: "I feel same." It was just not possible to start caring about any of the characters, or the stakes, or even whether it was an interesting set-up.

Maybe YA books are not for me

To be clear, I abandoned this book with maybe 10% left so I cannot tell you if it has an incredible conclusion that makes it all worthwhile. (The Wikipedia plot summary indicates: it does not. She's not allowed to die for narrative reasons!?!? Argh.)

Also, though: the world is teetering in such a fragile way... the destruction of ancient magical contracts is described as releasing so much uncontrollable magic that everyone will die and Zombies Will Rule Forever. So it's not clear how the ancient magical contracts got established in the first place, since the baseline level of magic is constant. This is the most charitable review I could give this book: the worldbuilding made no sense (and everything else about it was terrible, shallow, and bad). The conclusion seems to be: follow the rules that adults give you, do the work they assign, don't ask questions, don't think independently, don't make any choices, and despite getting stellar grades at expensive boarding school, you will still be atrociously bad at everything, but: shrug. You get to take baths and sometimes hold hands with a boy!

This post's theme word is verbigerate (v intr), "to obsessively repeat meaningless words and phrases." The word "charter" is verbigerated so often that it quickly reached semantic satiation.

Dealing with Dragons

Patricia C. Wrede's Dealing with Dragons is a cute, quick young adult fantasy novel. It was suggested to me as an amusing and light chaser after a series of depressing book recommendations. (Parse that as "books with a depressing effect, which books had been recommended to me" as opposed to "the recommendation itself was depressing").

The premise is that Princess Cimorine is a nonconforming princess --- sneaking off to learn magic, fencing, Latin, and other topics not traditionally on the princess syllabus. Her parents are extremely conforming royalty and do not seem capable of predicting that their one daughter who has already secretly tried to learn magic, and been explicitly forbidden from it, might next try to learn some other unexpectedly unprincessial topic, and so the story opens with a sequence of them being surprised and astonished every time they find that, forbidden from the last interesting topic, she has simply found a next interesting topic, instead of sticking within the lines and learning exclusively courtly manners and embroidery. Cimorine's parents, never subtle or clever, make it extremely clear that she will be forcibly betrothed and also married to Prince Therandil, who is a complete dullard and not at all interested in breaking out of the narrative conventions and fairytale strictures of his life.

So she lightly runs away. I say "lightly" because everyone in all the surrounding kingdoms seems to immediately get the update on her status, and she gets all kinds of mail-forwarding (physical mail? no. knights in mail? yes. yuk yuk) at her new address, which turns out to be as an assistant-of-all-purposes to a dragon.

The book was over in a flash --- just a tiny jaunt into the traditional fantasy/fairytale Cimorene's nonspecific vaguely medieval European world --- and did manage to keep me on my toes. The ways that Cimorene chose to subvert others' expectations were not... well, what I was expecting. She was also oddly compliant in some situations, e.g. just going along with dragon culture sometimes and persistently questioning it other times.

I liked this book, and would recommend it as a palate cleanser and something playful and short. (My book-recommender said that the subsequent books in this series had diminishing returns, so I moved on to other things in my concave-up to-read stack afterwards.)

This post's theme word is toxophily (n), "the practice of, love of, or addiction to, archery." Sourdough bread is passé; the latest idle at-home craze is indoor toxophily.

The Nightmare Stacks

The Nightmare Stacks is the seventh book in Charles Stross' The Laundry Files series (previously: 1 2 3 4 4.5 5 6). It is the second book to feature a different narrator (#6 also did this) --- this time, a new and mostly-unwilling recruit, a math PhD who has been turned into a vampire by an unlikely theorem discovered while researching esoteric topology for high-frequency trading banks. This character first showed up book #5, and is a good bumbling nerd.

TL;DR: I loved this book!

(Stross is nominated for a Hugo for "Best Series" this year for The Laundry Files, and I absolutely think he deserves it. We'll find out in a few weeks.)

The world of The Laundry Files is much like our own, up to some point in the 90s or 00s where it started diverging because it turns out that Lovecraftian horrors are real and are accessible to those with enough computational power/acumen/idiocy to summon them.  You'd think that it is good to be a computer/math nerd, then, since those are the people with the acumen to control Actual Magical Power, but with great power comes great mandatory bureaucratic machinery to control that power. Nerds are now double-burdened, firstly with the standard dollop of social marginalization, and secondly with the mandate to Save The World (and not let anyone find out they're doing it), and since most of Stross' nerdy characters are lawful good, they actually try to follow rules, limit civilian casualties, and get their stupid make-work done so that they can get to the real work in their off-hours.

The Lovecraftian descriptions include mention of Lovecraft, of course, because in the books' universe, Lovecraft was the same author as in ours (albeit much more accurate-to-reality). This means that characters can openly observe that certain monsters are Lovecraftian, or certain encounters have a DnD-ish flavor, and so on --- they are able to see how much their reality looks like a crafted fantasy story from our reality. This has some fun applications, as characters who e.g. play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons end up describing their encounters in DnD style. It also means that the reader can consider whether, and how, Stross' creations fit into the bigger fantasy pantheon, in the terms that his characters use for understanding their own experiences.

Apparently this setup is infinitely enjoyable to me; certainly Stross' tone, a wry sarcasm, is able to make descriptions of otherwise-mundane tasks a fun read. Plus it is peppered with the technical language of computer science, academia, and geekery. For example, describing the protagonist math PhD/social bumpkin: "Alex doesn't so much wonder about sex as have a fully developed five-year post-doc research program in mind, assuming he ever finds a willing collaborator." (p.195) Or referring to The Royal Armouries as "one of the largest collections of murder cutlery in the entire world." (p. 265) Or using the word "deterministic" for its technical meaning having to do with probability in "they make the entirely predictable and deterministic trip south to the big IKEA warehouse store" (p. 190).

This dry and skeptical tone is somehow shaped into a thrilling, electrifying read that had me shouting in excitement several times throughout the book. I read most of it in the period from midnight to dawn, because I got to a point and thought, no, Stross wouldn't possibly do that... how could he do that... how is he going to do THAT? I had the sense that Stross, as an author, is willing to make big and irreversible sacrifices for the sake of story, and I could not believe how much he chose to make this not another installment in an endlessly-extensible franchise. This is the book where Stross, Dungeon Master Extraordinaire of the Laundry-verse, makes it clear that he is not going to DM this game forever, and he is not afraid of the Total Party Kill. (I am slightly concerned for books 8 and 9, in my to-read queue.)

I am not sure how to convey how utterly stunning and brilliant a book this is, since the heavy plot choices and the sheer importance of what was happening are based on the many, many hours I have sunk into reading all the preceding books in the series, and immersing myself in Stross' dry and withdrawn attitude towards bureaucracy, tech support, and nerds with feelings. Overall this book was a virtuosic demonstration of Stross' command and control of narrative, his incredible attention to story beats, and the unrelenting and fantastic way that his cleverness will sneak up behind you and BOP you on the head with a pun that has been several pages (or chapters... or books!) in the making.

Conclusorily, this book was excellent and I recommend it --- but you might need to read 6 books' worth of prelude to enjoy it as much as I did.


This post's theme word is fuliginous (adj), "sooty", or "colored by soot, or having the color of soot." "Over it all she wears a black hooded cloak, fuliginous and dull as death." (p. 218)

Penric and the Shaman

Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric and the Shaman is one of the 2017 Hugo nominees (for novella). It is a straightforward fantasy-medieval-plus-magic setting, telling a story that pretty clearly can stand alone, but has lots of signposts and hooks pointing to its existence in a huge universe of available stories. (Indeed, there is an extensive and complicated author's note / reading-order guide appended to the end of the novella.) It tells the story of the titular Penric, himself possessing a dazzling array of magical and social powers, who gets sent on what definitely has the feeling of a sidequest. This ultimately involves a bit of travel, some clever conversations (both inside Penric's mind and outside), and a sprinkling of shamans.

I'd definitely read more of these books, though I might need to print out the reading-order guide to keep track of where I want to start and how to progress.

This is the third 2017 Hugo nominee which used the word "cabochon". Was there some kind of contest for writers last year that involved inserting this word into stories? I'm delighted to find that a newly-acquired vocabulary word is getting such exercise.

This post's theme words, featured in this work, are:

• scud (v), "to move or run swiftly, esp. as if driven forward; to run before a gale", 
• withy (n), "a flexible slender twig or branch", and
• lour (v. intr.), "to look sullen; to frown."

The louring caterpiller scudded down the withy at the sight of a bird.

A Taste of Honey

Kai Ashante Wilson's A Taste of Honey is one of the 2017 Hugo nominees (for novella). It tells the story of minor noble Aqib, who lives in a city heavily formulaic in its social structure, religion, and familial obligations.  Aquib is pretty oblivious about interpersonal signals, but somehow still manages to have chemistry, and then fall in love, with a foreign soldier visiting on embassy. He is faced with a choice --- flee home with his lover, or stay and fulfill his political/family obligations?

This choice fractures the story. It is told out-of-order, with some events of the "present" (meeting, falling in love), and some an entire lifetime in the future. This does not dissipate the weight or narrative tension of his choice, because we see scenes from both possible futures. He is happy in both, and sad sometimes, and has fulfilling lives no matter what his choice --- the story definitely comes down in favor of one choice, but the fact that he finds a place for himself in both branches seems an interesting moral, and leaves some exploration to the reader.

I liked it, though in length, topics, and writerly style, I probably wouldn't have picked this for myself.

The story also managed to cram in several new-to-me words. I had expected this of China Miéville's entry (he is dictionary-trawler extraordinaire), and it was nice to see so many:

• thew (n), "muscular strength"
• actinic (adj), "of, relating to, resulting from, or exhibiting chemical changes produced by radiant energy, especially in the visible and ultraviolet spectrum"
• fatidic (adj), "relating to or characterized by prophecy"
• tiffin (n), "a light meal, especially lunch."

This story also used the word "cabochon", which is pretty neat. (See previously.)

This post's theme word is mansuetude (n), "gentleness, meekness." His fatidic thews belied the mansuetude that he grew into as he matured; his appetite meant frequent tiffins, and he was often too shy to ask for more food in the actinic and judgmental dining hall.

The Obelisk Gate

 N. K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, a 2017 Hugo nominee, continues where The Fifth Season left off --- instants later. This means that it continues the momentum of the first novel, and since I am inhaling these books between fever-naps, I can continue to read, with no break between installments. This momentum is no slow-building thing; like the continental plates in the book itself, it starts with a lot of powerful momentum already. The Fifth Season is dedicated "For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question", a theme which is reinforced by later explicit guidelines for slavery, which state "Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default." (The Fifth Season, p. 61) These are generic enough to hook my attention: whether commenting on the explicit formation of an underclass, or the implicit ways in which gender often sidelines women, these quotes shape how I approached the book and the themes that stood out while reading.

If that was not enough, the series begins with a murder and progresses by showing that the main characters are not invincible or immortal. Jemisin does not shy away from killing characters who, in a typical fantasy context, I would have earmarked as protected-by-narrative-importance. Quite early, we have this narration:

When we say "the world has ended," it's usually a lie, because the planet is just fine.
But this is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.For the last time." (p. 15)

If the force of subjugated peoples were not enough, the blazing reference to T. S. Eliot is certainly a strong hook, a demand for attention and an indication of the scope and importance of the narrator's tale.

All these layers continue in The Obelisk Gate, where we finally see the culmination of the intertwined threads of The Fifth Season, and some new narrative threads begin to spread out. One would think that in a three-book series which begins with "this is the way the planet ends", there might not be very much more to say or do, but Jemisin's main characters reach to grasp their fate in full knowledge of the limits of their power and the lifetimes available to them. The novel progresses in the usual fantasy way --- people study hard, focus their attention, and are able to harness increasingly absurd amounts of mystical power --- but the a-few-months-ago apocalypse, and the characters' individual motivations, make this book enjoyable. There is, of course, some fantastic writing to carry the entire thing, a nice dollop of words atop a teetering pile of ideas.

I liked it.


This post's theme word is cabochon, "a gem polished but not faceted." The ability to control magic is a cabochon in children; a sparkling, cut jewel in trained adults.