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.

Time to Orbit: Unknown

Time to Orbit: Unknown is a novel by Derin Edala. It's the length of maybe 5 standard novels, but available to read in its entirety online here (some typos). This is a work in the specific genre "hypergraphic authors for voracious readers", subgenre "scifi themes". I only recommend it if you are in the target audience "voracious readers", in which case I strongly recommend it.

The story opens on an interstellar colony ship, with one passenger unexpectedly awakened from transport hibernation. This is a great setup from a novel standpoint, as the first-person narrator has no idea what is going on and provides a great introduction to the world for the readers. The fact that he has to figure out what's broken on the spaceship, from first principles, since he is not an astronaut, adds to this framing device convenience. It also makes the mystery delicious: we are discovering things at the same time as the narrator. A mystery! In space!

The author is excellent at their craft. I don't know how else to express it. This story starts as a space-scifi-mystery and every once in awhile, it completely shifts genre. (Spoilers: logistics challenge! science puzzle! rogue AI! social conflict leadership struggle! murder mystery! international interplanetary geopolitical conflict! sociology study of voluntary colonization! philosophical exploration of individuality!) Every time the genre shifted, I was absolutely convinced it was a good idea and the author brought me along. At some point I realized the game was "genre shift in an apparently-endless story" and I loved that, too.

Last week the author published the end --- chapter 183! --- of the story. It didn't end in a way I find satisfying, and it seemed a bit rushed, but honestly I don't know that any end to the infinitely-extensible-feeling beginning of the story would ever feel satisfactory.

Recommended if you have interest in a long reading project that is a bit silly and a bit tense and 100% scifi in the post-publishers-encouraging-doorstop-series era.

This post's theme word is ontic (adj), "having or relating to a real existence." Certain genre staples of science fiction are purely joyful, not ontic.

Six Wakes

Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes is a science fiction novel set on an interstellar ship, a whodunnit novel about clones and implanted memories. The premise seems interesting and I've read (and listened to podcasts of) much of Lafferty's other work.

This book suffers from writing that seems like it is trying to be adapted to a movie or maybe a TV series. Descriptions are sort of basic and don't use the full expressivity of written language. (I know this is a niche complaint, I am a reader of Specific Tastes.) Every chapter ends with a dramatic cliffhanger. These cliffhangers are often resolved by suddenly revealing backstory that the audience (and other characters) could not possibly have known or guessed. I was most irritated by the reveals that critical plot points depended on societal norms and laws about cloning, since the existence and details of those laws would have precluded a lot of the earlier points of confusion and plot.

If what you want is a mystery puzzle set on an interstellar colonizing ship, I've been enjoying Derin Edala's Time to Orbit: Unknown (which you can read free online).

This post's theme word is aspersion (n), "a damaging accusation; slander." It's strange to me that I have read so many books upon which I cast aspersions.

We Can Fix It!

Jess Fink's We Can Fix It! is a brief graphic novel that investigates the question: what if you could travel back in time to formative points in your youthful memories, to try to advise your younger self against making embarrassing mistakes?

What follows is a series of comedic exchanges. Some people never change, and the self-awareness to realize this makes the entire comic wry and clever. No big solutions are achieved, but saving your younger self from choking, from making out with the wrong teen, and from various self-esteem missteps is presented in a charming and delightful manner.

Recommended! It's a quick read.

This post's theme word is skiamachy (n), "a mock fight or a fight with an imaginary enemy." Philosophists debate whether the metaphorical skiamachy with insecurity is too on-the-nose when represented as a slap-fight with one's childhood self, enabled by time travel.

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 This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe

If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe is a fantasy (?) horror (?) comedy novel by Jason Pargin, who also wrote John Dies at the End.

Like John Dies at the End -- as well as Pargin's other self-descriptive novels titled This Book is Full of Spiders, and What the Hell Did I Just Read -- this novel's title completely gives away the tone and contents of the book, while still preserving enough wacky mystery that the book can surprise. In this case, I vaguely remembered that John Dies at the End was sort of gonzo-humor and so my surprise came mostly from the graphic horror elements of If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. I wasn't expecting those, didn't want them, and don't usually seek out that particular genre for my pleasure reading.

The comedy was suitably wacky, the mystery of the book was indeed clued variously throughout the book but readers would not ever have guessed the actual way it would resolve, and as the title declares, the book does attempt to describe its own provenance and the issues that it causes.

Overall this was a fine book --- a quick read at 432 pages, although I had to stop reading it before bed because the graphic horror scenes were not good pre-sleep brain fodder for dreams. The cover is an electric green-yellow and the cover art is great; the color, art, and title probably mostly explain why I picked this up and read it. It also was a good brain puzzle.

Recommended if you like horror or ghastly comedy. Pretty gorey and dark, plus I'm pretty sure almost every character is described in the depths of depression and various other mental illnesses, as well as everyone suffering under wretched capitalism and societal decline.

This post's theme word is penultimatum (n), "the demand made before an ultimatum." Climactic scenes should feature an explicitly-identified penultimatum, so that all readers can appropriately ratchet their anticipation.

Cryptid Club

Cryptid Club is a book collection of Sarah Andersen's series of comics about fictional/mythical creatures. The art style is cute but with a sarcastic twinge, and the humor leaves a lot of space for beats and reading between the lines (and glances) on the page. Overall this was a delight and a quick read, since it's a short comic series, and I loved it. Recommended.

Plus, the cover glows in the dark!

This post's theme word is peritext (n), "the material surrounding the main text of the book, such as covers, preface, bibliography, colophon, etc." The Cryptic Club peritext is delightful and includes an author-bio-style glossary in the back with pictures and descriptions of all starring cryptids.

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store

Keigo Higashino's The Miracles of the Namiya General Store is an odd novel, and one that came recommended by a friend and without any other context (I think I was told "it's very famous and popular in Japan" and "I think you'll like it"). I would not have found it on my own, but it is a perfect little self-contained dumpling of a novel.

The novel centers on the titular general store, whose proprietor accepts letters asking for advice; some replies are posted in the front window, and some are left for private pickup and review in the back of the store. The letters start as lighthearted pranks from local schoolkids but in the course of the novel we see a wide variety of people, in moments of vulnerability, turn to a stranger for advice. And the advice is mixed! Sometimes good, sometimes bad, always trying to meet them where they are.

What struck me reading this book was the subtle ways that it became clear that the cultural expectations were not what I expected. Whether because of the author's background, the setting, or the writing style, people kept being set up for climactic scenes or decisions and then... juddering to a different point. Sometimes I thought one path was clearly signaled and the characters (and narration!) didn't even seem to think it was possible; other times, something momentous happened out of nowhere. Conversations careened in ways I didn't understand; characters made silent assumptions about each other that I didn't have access to. It was a curious experience.

Overall the book was good, quite varied in its stories and never predictable. Is this modern fiction? Fantasy? Magical realism? I didn't know what to expect, the plot didn't follow any threads for too long so no one person was actually the focus, and incidental characters were shifted into and out of the spotlight all the time. It was tied up in a tidy way, but not a happy ending.

I liked it.

This post's theme word is alterity (n), "otherness; the quality or state of being other or different." The stories were interwoven with each other in a style that highlighted their similarities explicitly and left the overall alterity for the reader to find.

Artificial Condition

Artificial Condition is the second in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2019. It continues the first-person account of a now-rogue human-robot construct which used to be an armed security agent but is now free(ish) to pursue its own interests --- but notably still constrained by the weird hodgepodge of spacefaring human societies and their various legal and social restrictions, the most relevant of which is that Murderbot is not considered a full, independent person and is regarded as something closer to property or a slave.

This book continued the tone and themes of the previous one, central among them the Murderbot's increasing self-awareness of things like emotional state, body language, facial expression, and social relationships. But in an extremely sardonic and analytical tone, of course --- this leads to some delightful things like "pouting" by powering down or the classic description of the murderbot development cycle: "But you can't put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security... So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects." (chapter 2, 9%) It also hit some poignant storytelling beats that land particularly hard given the narrator: in discussing TV dramas, it says, "But there weren't any depictions of [murderbots] in books, either. I guess you can't tell a story from the point of view of something that you don't think has a point of view." (chapter 2, 17%)

In addition to casting aspersions on all humans for their idiotic/bigoted attitudes towards non-humans, the book does a fair amount of oblique emotional growth for Murderbot --- for example "I shouldn't have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn't let it." (chapter 3, 19%) Murderbot's one true passion is watching teledramas, which often get referenced "in an effort to figure out what the hell was going on with humans. It hadn't helped." (chapter 7, 73%) Nevertheless Murderbot has some self-realizations like "And now I knew why I hadn't wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person." (chapter 4, 32%, delightfully reversing many decades of "robots want to pass as human" tropes in fiction!) and the final portion of the book, which included a lot of introspection like "I wish being a construct made me less irrational than the average human but you may have noticed this is not the case." (chapter 7, 78%)

I liked this book --- it was again very quick and enjoyable. I am curious what future adventures Murderbot can get up to, since book 1 was "liberation" and book 2 was "uncovering past secrets" so the future can only hold new wrinkles. We readers got a taste of what is going on in the broader human civilization and it seems like an omnishambles. Given the extremely high number of times that bots/constructs casually edit security logs, footage, and human databases, my estimate of this human civilization is that its documents are swiss cheese and completely unreliable, and it only limps along because all of the non-human intelligences basically tolerate the humans because life would be boring without them --- but the humans have no idea! I'm curious if this will be explored more.

This post's theme word is Gallionic (adj), "indifferent or uncaring." The intelligences running ships are neither rule-bound nor Gallionic regarding their human passengers.

All Systems Red

All Systems Red is the first in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2018. It is a first-person account of a human-robot construct which is tasked with corporate security on an exploration mission to a new planet. It's quick and short, and the fun parts are:

• the story is told in the first person from a point of view which includes interfacing with drone cameras and so is much broader and more comprehensive than a usual human, BUT which also occasionally glitches or shuts down
• the internal monologue voice is dry and a little sarcastic, but the vocalized speech is all pretty straightforward --- this contrast was very satisfying
• on the second read, I noticed that the narration was impeccable about the Murderbot both not having a name and not having a gender; this was done so smoothly that on first read I had mentally pictured Murderbot as a woman (I guess because it was first person and that's how I perceive myself)

There's a ton of delight to be had in closely examining the story in retrospect --- it is essentially an entire narrative centered on the narrator's feelings, emotional state, expression of sentiment, and social cues like body language, but in a "doth protest too much, methinks" way, the narrator's main focus is persistently to avoid feeling or engaging with any emotion. (Multiple scenes include the lowering of an opaque visor or the narrator moving to stand facing the corner mid-conversation.) It's very well-crafted, to be a sneaky story about feelings which constantly mentions how feelings aren't there and shouldn't be acknowledged and could we please just focus on not all getting killed?

I picked it up again as a palate cleanser and enjoyed it; there are many more in this series, all queued up in my library.

This post's theme word is pensum (n), "a task, especially given as punishment." The ability to self-edit and control administrative privileges removes the threat of pensums.

Some retroblogged posts

I often want to date my post the date that I had the experience/thought/whatever, but I don't actually get around to making the post until later. Sometimes much later...

Recent new-old posts that you might have not seen because even RSS feeds don't pick 'em up:

Thank you class of 2020

Musée de Cluny

Poesy the Monster Slayer

Doppelgänger

Yes, I'm wildly abusing the format but since the main reader of this blog is me it's ... fine. Self-indulgent public posting is the name of the modern game and I'm doing it in my own way. I also have books, so many books, to write about --- with posts in various states of drafting and editing --- probably about one or two a week. For the past two years at least. Are they posted? Mostly not. Will they ever be? It depends on how much dopamine I dispense to myself for finally pushing that "publish" button.

And of course more books are arriving regularly here... I have not ordered any new books in more than a month, but the mail delays, backorders, and long-ago pre-orders mean that I have easily a full year's worth of reading already in headed my way, plus a house full of books that deserve first- and nth-readings.

extremely relatable content by Tom Gauld

This post's theme word is silvicolous (adj), "living or growing in the woods." Silvicolous libraries could be locally-sourced!

How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It

K. J. Parker's How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It is the sequel to Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and begins approximately 10 seconds after the previous book ends.

Ok, maybe more like seven years? But we get enough flashbacks with our shiny, new unreliable narrator, that it is possible for the reader to piece together the continuous storyline of what has happened in the empire --- now reduced to a single walled city --- since the first book.

This book's narrator is an actor/playwright who, in the opening chapter, pitches a play wherein a nobody gets poached off the street by "the lord high chamberlain and the grand vizier. In disguise, of course. ...And they point out that the man bears an uncanny resemblance to the king. ... And it turns out that the king's been abducted by traitors in the pay of the enemy, who want to start a war, so we need you to pretend to be him" (p. 1-2). This is an incredibly bold move! -- to open a book with a Chekov's screenplay so heavily foreshadowing that it seemed like I might require the attention of a head trauma specialist. The snide narrator, of course, does this all with a wink-to-camera so big that he probably required an optometrist visit afterwards, all while waving and dancing and screaming "I am an unreliable narrator!" What a way to start a novel, ending chapter 1 with a sneering summary of plot points to make a story marketable:

Virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. I have to confess I'm no scholar, so for all I know there may be unicorns, in Permia or somewhere lie that, so maybe one component of that list does actually exist in real life. Wouldn't like to  bet the rent on it, though. (p 3)

I found this fun and absolutely in the style of the previous book, except that for some reason I liked this unreliable narrator more than that one. Maybe it was the incredible boldness of starting with such an obvious completely-unhidden augury that I actually wondered if all those things would come true, and which would be subverted, by the end --- would there be a unicorn? Maybe as a metaphor? Maybe as a prop?

The house was easy to recognize, because some clown with an unfortunate money-to-taste ratio had thought twin gateposts in the form of winged horses was a good idea. (p 32)

I liked this hint of unicorn-y-ness and the phrase "unfortunate money-to-taste ratio".

There was a ring of authenticity in the actor-narrator's reflection "I'm being him, which I can do as easily as I am me --- which isn't exactly easy in any realistic sense of the word. Because being me has never been easy. and on balance I'd far rather be anybody else but me." (p 51)

And there was an aching bruised feeling to the summary "I looked for just such a plan. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, or maybe it's top secret. Or maybe --- It slowly dawned on me that it's possible for the wise men who run your life for you to see disaster coming and  not have a plan for dealing with it; because they know what needs to be done but there are vested interests in the way, or they can't figure out the politics, or they think it'll be horrendously unpopular, or it'll cost too much money, a commodity you can't take with you..." (p 77)

Overall I liked this book better than the previous one, although the two narrator characters were basically identical in attitude and tone. I enjoyed that book 2 started by immediately disavowing the entirety of book 1 and even calling into question whether the narrator in book 1 even existed. My main negative about this book was that it tried to have so many twists that it twisted itself up, and the solution that was obvious from early in the book --- that one solution that would completely resolve all the plot conflicts --- was just ignored in favor of weird oblique strategies-with-a-twist!, as if this were some sort of Oceans-Eleven-style caper. It's not. So the final book resolution was the thing that had seemed obvious from the start, and I did not believe that the smart characters were surprised, because even I, with the limited information made available by the unreliable and manipulative narrator, was able to anticipate the conclusion.

It was diverting, and the cover art is great! Weirdly, book 1's cover is velvety but book 2's cover is crisp, even though I got matching editions.

This post's theme word is annelidous (adj), "of or relating to worms." There is an annelidous sequence of undermining, counter-undermining, contra-counter-undermining, and Bitter-Butter-Battle-style tunneling in this book about a besieged walled city. 

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

K. J. Parker's Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is a low-fantasy swirl of sardonic, unreliable narration. It is told in the style of direct address, with the narrator in full acknowledgement of his readership audience and historical context; it tells the story of how a lowly ethnic-minority army engineer lied, cheated, manipulated the bureaucracy, and used commonsense engineering-brain to protect the capital city from complete obliteration.

The narrative style was clever and comforting, but after about three chapters which end with a twist or cliffhanger, I came to expect it. This undermined my enjoyment of the unreliable narration, since it was easy to make the assumption "some stuff is lies and the rest is obscured to make a dramatic reveal later" in every chapter and always, always be correct. In the end it answered lots of questions and didn't leave me with much to mull over.

The very clever and self-contradicting narrator, in a style of direct address, the preface and addendum notes that directly disavow the historicity of the contents of the narration (it's a low-fantasy medieval walled city of no particular resemblance to anything), all the snide to-camera comments making fun of personalities around him... all these are elements which I enjoy, but overall the book didn't capture me and I found myself thinking wistfully of how excellent A Deadly Education was. This book doesn't seem like it will stick with me, but it was fun.

We've been ingenious, resourceful and inventive, and we haven't let ourselves be hindered by outmoded or irrelevant ways of thinking. It's a shame, really, because nobody will ever know how clever we were. (p 113)

This post's theme word is propugnaculum (n), "a fortress; defense; protection". The trained defense soldiers and maintenance workers are a vital part of your walled city's propugnaculum; in this case, the public gardeners! 

P.S. Every time I catch the title of this book out of the corner of my eye, it triggers my subconscious and "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" starts playing in my head. I had been idly humming it to myself for days before realizing that this book was the cause.

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.

Phallacy

Emily Willingham's Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis is not what I expected. Based on the cover art and the subtitle, it seemed packaged as a popular science book, so I thought it would be a little biology, some interesting research anecdotes maybe, and (of course) the mandatory discussion of bedbugs and slugs ("traumatic insemination" is an extremely clickbait-y phrase).

The book did include those things, but they were side notes --- its true focus was humans, and particularly the way that we (esp. in the west) have structured society in general and scientific research in particular to ignore things that are female-affiliated, even when that is an obvious detriment to scientific knowledge and research advancement. Plus there was an always-uncomfortable, but straightforward and unforgiving, broad consideration of toxic masculinity.

I think in retrospect that it's mostly "life lessons" and only sort of tangentially about "the animal penis", especially since the book itself contains so many descriptions of ways that various animals transfer gametes that are not a penis. The tone overall was straightforward but wry and unquestionably a woman's voice: it unflinchingly and repeatedly drew parallels to the animal kingdom and pointed out how hollow and stupid and full of preconceived notions those parallels were. It was sprinkled with absolutely fantastic footnotes and asides. Willingham has a wonderful authorial tone and a gift for introducing neologisms and puns, casually adding references to popular culture and ancient history, and overall just making me wish that I was her friend so we could cackle together.

My notes overall ended up being mostly phrases or sentences that just struck me as awesome:

• simile used when discussing evolution: "You can be as fragile as a dictator's ego and still have attributes that prop you up, keep you alive in the current environment, and lead you to successful reproduction." (p 14)
• "When it comes to evolutionary studies of sex, gender, and genitalia, guess who the "winners" are?* [footnote: *Men. It's men.]" (p 15)
• "In this work, they used what they called "haptics" and every one else calls "dildos"" (p 30)
• "Lest I come across as unamused and far too earnest, I do think that genitalia and fart jokes can be hilarious." (p 46)
• "Frogs collect of an evening round the pond," (p 65)
• "Given that the human penis couldn't stab through a perfectly ripe avocado," (p 77)
• "The genre of "arthropod (and invertebrate) sex films" is small but mighty." (p 77)
• "This is a very fighty kind of bird, considering that they all apparently agree to go condo together." (p 84)
• "Who hasn't needed, at some point, to reach a neighbor with a lengthy protrusible organ, even if it was just spraying them with a water hose? If you're a barnacle, ..." (p 86)
• "[footnote: *The noise that they make is called "orgling."]" (p 106)
• p 132 she discusses her previous teaching and describes herself as showing slides and "intoning" and then says "I was obviously electric in the classroom."
• some great neologisms like "intromittens" (used frequently) and "tuatararium" (a terrarium for tuatara, p 216) which often is accompanied e.g. by "[footnote: *Yes, I made this word up.]"
• on p 288 I was caught off-guard by the phrase "squad goals" used w.r.t. mites
• "got his Twitter account... suspended for violating Twitter rules, which we all know is almost impossible to do if you're a white male." (p 243)
• "Lest I attract unnecessary derision (only necessary derision, please), no, I do not really think that..." (p 257)
• "This particular, not especially long (in words, but oh, the psychic pain lingers) paper uses the word "penis" more than a hundred times and the word "phallus" sixty times." (p 268)

Overall the book was interesting and suggested new ways of considering and engaging with these issues, and I liked it. I probably wouldn't have read it if not for the squid on the cover, though, so I know my own vulnerabilities.

This post's theme word is lepodactylous (adj), "having slender fingers or toes." I will not be able to consider mittens for the lepodactylous without thinking of arachnids.

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.