Love Medley (Fairbanks)
Aug. 26th, 2025 10:15 pmI have been sitting on this for months but I can finally tell you that the book I have been doing a ton of beta-reading for is out! Love Medley, by Lyssa Fairbanks, is a romance novel. One of the two protagonists is Lucy, a third-gen Chinese-American fourth-year medical student. She's quite bright and often goes full speed ahead at a moment's notice, which can be both a good and a bad thing; as the book opens, she is just finding her way out of an abusive relationship. The other protagonist is Jake, a Midwestern ER nurse who moonlights as a dueling pianist. Jake is a musical people-person; as the book opens, he is finding his way free of his emotionally controlling family. Lucy enlists Jake's help as a fake boyfriend to get her toxic ex to leave her alone, but will this lead to more? (...I mean, it's a romance novel, that was a rhetorical question.)
It's part of a projected 4-book series involving a close friend-group of four, of whom Lucy is one, who are making their way through medical school. (And the second book will be F/F, I've read the rough draft and am excited about that one too!) Jake, not to be outdone, has his own friends as well! As usual, I adore the ensemble scenes more than the actual romance. ;) (A me thing, of course! The romance is also very nice!)
The book includes a content notes page that cites explicit sex scenes, emotional abuse (on-page), physical abuse (off-page), explicit language, emotionally abusive parents. It is also very clearly a romance book, and I know this is not everyone's favorite cup of tea, but if you like romances then I think it's a great contender in the genre!
I would like to give the kindle e-book to the first five people who tell me they'd like one (I'll update this post if/when that number is reached) -- please DM me with your email address :) I'm sure the author would very much appreciate it if you left an honest review on amazon, but don't feel compelled to -- this isn't an "exchange" for a review, this is just me doing this for fun :)
If you would like to support the author, the book is available on amazon here or signed copies are available from Left Bank Books here. It's also available on Kindle Unlimited.
(BTW, Lyssa Fairbanks is a pen name. If you know the author (which a couple of you do, or may be able to to figure out that you do), please do not talk publicly about their real name or how I know them, thank you!)
It's part of a projected 4-book series involving a close friend-group of four, of whom Lucy is one, who are making their way through medical school. (And the second book will be F/F, I've read the rough draft and am excited about that one too!) Jake, not to be outdone, has his own friends as well! As usual, I adore the ensemble scenes more than the actual romance. ;) (A me thing, of course! The romance is also very nice!)
The book includes a content notes page that cites explicit sex scenes, emotional abuse (on-page), physical abuse (off-page), explicit language, emotionally abusive parents. It is also very clearly a romance book, and I know this is not everyone's favorite cup of tea, but if you like romances then I think it's a great contender in the genre!
I would like to give the kindle e-book to the first five people who tell me they'd like one (I'll update this post if/when that number is reached) -- please DM me with your email address :) I'm sure the author would very much appreciate it if you left an honest review on amazon, but don't feel compelled to -- this isn't an "exchange" for a review, this is just me doing this for fun :)
If you would like to support the author, the book is available on amazon here or signed copies are available from Left Bank Books here. It's also available on Kindle Unlimited.
(BTW, Lyssa Fairbanks is a pen name. If you know the author (which a couple of you do, or may be able to to figure out that you do), please do not talk publicly about their real name or how I know them, thank you!)
Blood over Bright Haven (Wang)
Aug. 6th, 2025 05:39 pm3+/5. As this book starts, Sciona Freynan, an extremely talented and driven mage who cares about magic and really nothing else, is going to take the exams to become a Highmage, one of the few elite magicians who is responsible for powering the magic city of Tiran. She's the only girl of her generation to even be asked to take the tests, because she lives in a deeply sexist society, which she knows and hates. Fortunately, she also knows she can ace the exams. However, the sexism of the other mages means that, even as a Highmage, she gets a janitor as a lab assistant, Thomil, who is from an immigrant group called the Kwen that are refugees from a magical Blight that has killed their lands and people; the Kwen are widely regarded to be subhuman. (That is to say, this society is deeply racist as well as deeply sexist!)
I was first recced this book during a conversation I had with someone in RL who said that she felt that Some Desperate Glory was kind of your run-of-the-mill YA dystopia and recommended this one instead. I also read![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija's take on it, which was a helpful counterpoint to my RL convo. I ended up feeling about it maybe in the middle of the two reactions? I did end up liking it, but I also... thought it was much, much more of your run-of-the-mill YA dystopia than SDG.
Now... I have read a fair amount of YA dystopia for various reasons, and some of it can get incredibly and eye-rollingly anvilicious, where the heroine (it's always a heroine) talks like tumblr posts and the villains kick puppies for fun. This was actually in some sense not that way on the surface, in the sense that Sciona is herself reasonably realistically racist, and there is at least one of the Highmages who is presented as a reasonably nice and not-as-sexist person. However, by the end there is a sufficient divide between the Kwen (who are basically perfect) and Sciona (who is flawed) and pretty much everyone else (super racist) that I was feeling somewhat anvil-icized, even though at the same time I do think that it was much better on this front than the average YA dystopia.
There is a plot twist in the middle which I did not guess (although I did feel rather like I should have, and perhaps would have if I'd really sat down and thought about it) and which I greatly enjoyed. I suspect that one's enjoyment of this book may be predicated on whether one guesses it or not. That part was pretty great, but then I felt that much of the second half of the book was sort of a slog as Sciona then figures out what to do about the plot twist, but it got better once she had her plan in hand. I also did not guess her plan / the ending. I did not think that the book would go there, but it did and I admired it for having the courage of its convictions, and I admired the depiction of Sciona for being extremely consistent all through. I respect that Wang didn't try to make out like Sciona was better or more perfect than she actually was. Though the book, in my opinion, does suffer when compared to SDG, which doesn't just go for character consistency but for really hard change which takes an entire book to work through.
So yeah, I didn't guess that Sciona was going to burn the entire Magistry and government down! Literally! While she was herself poisoned!
But... it also seemed like maximum chaos for both Tiran and the Kwen, and a bunch of people, both Tiranish and Kwen, have already died and a lot more are probably gonna die, and it really isn't super clear that what is going to come out of all the chaos will be anything better than what was there before, except possibly it might be forced to be less dystopian because all the people running the dystopian technology have been destroyed. On the other hand, I did rather admire how Sciona's flaws of (a) not really caring about other humans and (b) not having any idea how other humans would react to things, because, well, see (a), were really consistent here.
And I loved how she does embrace all her flaws at the end: She had always belonged here with insatiable men, her brothers in greed and ego. Sciona's only distinction among these mages was that she was a more honest monster than any of them. Yeah, that's... pretty accurate! And like I said before, I respect that.
I must say I prefer books where the resolution at least makes stabs towards breaking the cycle of more and more violence, instead of accelerating the cycle (well, Thomil did make one effort towards that, which was nice; Sciona sure did not), but I do enjoy reading one of the latter every once in a while.
A couple of other spoilery issues I had:
- I totally did not buy that Sciona would have a different reaction to the plot twist (that all of their magic was causing the Blight) than every other Tiranish we see in the entire city (except maybe poor dumb Mordra, and it's not even entirely clear what his reaction is). I mean, to be fair, her negative reaction wasn't instant either (and that was well done), but she's grown up in Tiran her whole life, she's not devout but she's reasonably religious, she's been told her whole life that Kwen are inferior (and even says things to that effect), she just doesn't care about other people in general; it's not at all clear to me why she should be the one person to think differently than the others. The book explanation that no one else cares, I think, is that everyone else is horrible and racist, except I guess one offscreen guy who was so overcome that he committed suicide when he found out the truth before the book even started. Idk, I think there should have been more Tiranish who shared her reaction, or at least some who spanned more of a space of reactions. But I guess that would have been more complicated.
- What do people in Tiran eat? Aren't there, like, farms and things outside the city? Wouldn't the Blight affect those? Do they not trade with anyone? Use wood? It really seems to me that the ecological issues of the Blight would have a definite impact on Tiran by now.
I also thought the magic system was hilariously awesome. The mages use a typewriter -- they call it a spellograph -- to type up spells with very precise coordinates and variables (there's a great bit where Sciona is explaining to Thomil what a variable is, without using that exact term of course). So there are parts like this: She assigned the name POWER. Next, she wrote an action sub-spell called FIRE, inside which she assigned the carbon ball the name DEVICE. (I'm not even gonna get into the if and only if CONDITIONS of this spell, because it's quoted inrachelmanija's review.) I mean, yes, cool! I'm totally on board with algorithmic magic! Then I showed it to D and he was immediately like, "Wow, they use COBOL to do magic in this world!" (He does feel opposed to this on principle... mostly because it's COBOL.)
I was first recced this book during a conversation I had with someone in RL who said that she felt that Some Desperate Glory was kind of your run-of-the-mill YA dystopia and recommended this one instead. I also read
rachelmanija's take on it, which was a helpful counterpoint to my RL convo. I ended up feeling about it maybe in the middle of the two reactions? I did end up liking it, but I also... thought it was much, much more of your run-of-the-mill YA dystopia than SDG.Now... I have read a fair amount of YA dystopia for various reasons, and some of it can get incredibly and eye-rollingly anvilicious, where the heroine (it's always a heroine) talks like tumblr posts and the villains kick puppies for fun. This was actually in some sense not that way on the surface, in the sense that Sciona is herself reasonably realistically racist, and there is at least one of the Highmages who is presented as a reasonably nice and not-as-sexist person. However, by the end there is a sufficient divide between the Kwen (who are basically perfect) and Sciona (who is flawed) and pretty much everyone else (super racist) that I was feeling somewhat anvil-icized, even though at the same time I do think that it was much better on this front than the average YA dystopia.
There is a plot twist in the middle which I did not guess (although I did feel rather like I should have, and perhaps would have if I'd really sat down and thought about it) and which I greatly enjoyed. I suspect that one's enjoyment of this book may be predicated on whether one guesses it or not. That part was pretty great, but then I felt that much of the second half of the book was sort of a slog as Sciona then figures out what to do about the plot twist, but it got better once she had her plan in hand. I also did not guess her plan / the ending. I did not think that the book would go there, but it did and I admired it for having the courage of its convictions, and I admired the depiction of Sciona for being extremely consistent all through. I respect that Wang didn't try to make out like Sciona was better or more perfect than she actually was. Though the book, in my opinion, does suffer when compared to SDG, which doesn't just go for character consistency but for really hard change which takes an entire book to work through.
Spoilery thoughts
So yeah, I didn't guess that Sciona was going to burn the entire Magistry and government down! Literally! While she was herself poisoned!
But... it also seemed like maximum chaos for both Tiran and the Kwen, and a bunch of people, both Tiranish and Kwen, have already died and a lot more are probably gonna die, and it really isn't super clear that what is going to come out of all the chaos will be anything better than what was there before, except possibly it might be forced to be less dystopian because all the people running the dystopian technology have been destroyed. On the other hand, I did rather admire how Sciona's flaws of (a) not really caring about other humans and (b) not having any idea how other humans would react to things, because, well, see (a), were really consistent here.
And I loved how she does embrace all her flaws at the end: She had always belonged here with insatiable men, her brothers in greed and ego. Sciona's only distinction among these mages was that she was a more honest monster than any of them. Yeah, that's... pretty accurate! And like I said before, I respect that.
I must say I prefer books where the resolution at least makes stabs towards breaking the cycle of more and more violence, instead of accelerating the cycle (well, Thomil did make one effort towards that, which was nice; Sciona sure did not), but I do enjoy reading one of the latter every once in a while.
A couple of other spoilery issues I had:
- I totally did not buy that Sciona would have a different reaction to the plot twist (that all of their magic was causing the Blight) than every other Tiranish we see in the entire city (except maybe poor dumb Mordra, and it's not even entirely clear what his reaction is). I mean, to be fair, her negative reaction wasn't instant either (and that was well done), but she's grown up in Tiran her whole life, she's not devout but she's reasonably religious, she's been told her whole life that Kwen are inferior (and even says things to that effect), she just doesn't care about other people in general; it's not at all clear to me why she should be the one person to think differently than the others. The book explanation that no one else cares, I think, is that everyone else is horrible and racist, except I guess one offscreen guy who was so overcome that he committed suicide when he found out the truth before the book even started. Idk, I think there should have been more Tiranish who shared her reaction, or at least some who spanned more of a space of reactions. But I guess that would have been more complicated.
- What do people in Tiran eat? Aren't there, like, farms and things outside the city? Wouldn't the Blight affect those? Do they not trade with anyone? Use wood? It really seems to me that the ecological issues of the Blight would have a definite impact on Tiran by now.
I also thought the magic system was hilariously awesome. The mages use a typewriter -- they call it a spellograph -- to type up spells with very precise coordinates and variables (there's a great bit where Sciona is explaining to Thomil what a variable is, without using that exact term of course). So there are parts like this: She assigned the name POWER. Next, she wrote an action sub-spell called FIRE, inside which she assigned the carbon ball the name DEVICE. (I'm not even gonna get into the if and only if CONDITIONS of this spell, because it's quoted in
rachelmanija's review.) I mean, yes, cool! I'm totally on board with algorithmic magic! Then I showed it to D and he was immediately like, "Wow, they use COBOL to do magic in this world!" (He does feel opposed to this on principle... mostly because it's COBOL.)This Is the Hour (Feuchtwanger)
Jul. 9th, 2025 08:49 pmVia selenak, of course :) This was a very interesting and somewhat odd historical fiction book about Francisco Goya, the painter, and his life and times in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (the book begins with the Spanish court talking about Marie Antoinette's recent death -- so ~1793 -- and ends around 1800). I must admit that Spain is a big hole in my already-very-spotty knowledge of Europe, although opera fandom and salon helped a lot by filling in at least a couple of gaps about Philip II, the Escorial, and the Duke of Alba (and Philip V who thought he was a frog, but who does not appear in this book at all). Now, of course, Philip II was a couple of centuries too soon for this book (even I knew that!) but he's namechecked a couple of times, as is Fernando Álvarez de Toledo (Third Duke of Alba), again centuries too early but the forerunner of the Duchess of Alba in this book, who is a major character (María Cayetana de Silva; her husband Don José Álvarez de Toledo is a minor character).
Goya I knew absolutely nothing about, except that I knew he was a painter, and I knew (hilariously, from a Snoopy cartoon) he'd painted a kid with a dog (Google tells me this is his famous "Red Boy" painting). One of the really cool things about the book is the way it functions as an art guide (and one with a whole lot more context than usual art guides) to some of Goya's famous paintings. I only started following along with the wikipedia list of his paintings once I hit the middle or so (I read the first half on a plane and during a retreat), but I wish I'd done that the whole time! I know so little about art that it was helpful to have the "interpretation" of it right there (Feuchtwanger often includes the reaction of various people to the art piece, as well as Goya's feelings about it).
Indeed the book is dictated by the art, to a certain extent: if you look at Goya's pictures in chronological order (as I have now done), he does these sort of nice standard pictures until... about 1793, when the pictures start getting more interesting (and indeed the book starts with Goya making a breakthrough in his art). And then around 1800 is when he starts doing these crazy engravings that start looking much more modern -- like, you can totally see them as an artistic bridge between Bosch (namechecked in the book) and Dali (who obviously was yet to come far in the future) -- his book of engravings, Los Caprichos, is what the book ends on (and the title is taken from that of the last Caprichos engraving, Ya es hora).
It is curiously missing in any real sort of character arc -- I mean, Goya keeps talking about how he's progressed in life and thinks about things so differently now, but really he seems to me to be pretty much the same at the end as the beginning, except more battered by life. It's his art that has progressed, though. Instead of a character arc we have an art arc, I guess!
The book also cheerfully uses all the most sensational theories about Goya and the Spanish court possible, with the effect that it is quite compelling but does veer a bit into "wow, this is Very Soap Opera" at times. Basically, everyone is having torrid love affairs with everyone else, and all of that becomes totally relevant to all the politics that's going on. Some of this is attested historically, and some of it is less so. On one hand, Manuel Godoy, the Secretary of State, does appear to have had a close relationship with Queen Maria Luisa (Wikipedia, at least, does not think that there is any direct evidence they were lovers, but at least it's clear there were rumors). But as far as I can tell from Google, Maria Cayetana, Duchess of Alba, did die mysteriously, buuuuut there isn't any evidence at all that she died as a result of a botched abortion of Goya's baby. (Did I mention Very Soap Opera?? Yeah.)
It's sort of shocking to me that the book ends before any of the War of Spanish Independence, which happens just a few years later (which again, since I know zero Spanish history I just found out about while reading various wiki articles after reading this) or Goya's resulting engravings on The Disasters of War (ditto), although I guess all the signs are there as to what's going to happen -- it's not that different from what Feuchtwanger did in Proud Destiny, where even I know that the French Revolution is going to happen, but he doesn't show it in the book.
Requisite Feuchtwanger things: 1) protagonist is irresistable to the ladies and has multiple women who are crazy about him, check 2) small child dies, check.
Ranking in Feuchtwangers: I think the Josephus trilogy is still my favorite, and Jud Süß is still the one I'm most impressed by, but I did like this quite a bit, especially when I had the visuals to go with it.
selenak, of course :) This was a very interesting and somewhat odd historical fiction book about Francisco Goya, the painter, and his life and times in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (the book begins with the Spanish court talking about Marie Antoinette's recent death -- so ~1793 -- and ends around 1800). I must admit that Spain is a big hole in my already-very-spotty knowledge of Europe, although opera fandom and salon helped a lot by filling in at least a couple of gaps about Philip II, the Escorial, and the Duke of Alba (and Philip V who thought he was a frog, but who does not appear in this book at all). Now, of course, Philip II was a couple of centuries too soon for this book (even I knew that!) but he's namechecked a couple of times, as is Fernando Álvarez de Toledo (Third Duke of Alba), again centuries too early but the forerunner of the Duchess of Alba in this book, who is a major character (María Cayetana de Silva; her husband Don José Álvarez de Toledo is a minor character). Goya I knew absolutely nothing about, except that I knew he was a painter, and I knew (hilariously, from a Snoopy cartoon) he'd painted a kid with a dog (Google tells me this is his famous "Red Boy" painting). One of the really cool things about the book is the way it functions as an art guide (and one with a whole lot more context than usual art guides) to some of Goya's famous paintings. I only started following along with the wikipedia list of his paintings once I hit the middle or so (I read the first half on a plane and during a retreat), but I wish I'd done that the whole time! I know so little about art that it was helpful to have the "interpretation" of it right there (Feuchtwanger often includes the reaction of various people to the art piece, as well as Goya's feelings about it).
Indeed the book is dictated by the art, to a certain extent: if you look at Goya's pictures in chronological order (as I have now done), he does these sort of nice standard pictures until... about 1793, when the pictures start getting more interesting (and indeed the book starts with Goya making a breakthrough in his art). And then around 1800 is when he starts doing these crazy engravings that start looking much more modern -- like, you can totally see them as an artistic bridge between Bosch (namechecked in the book) and Dali (who obviously was yet to come far in the future) -- his book of engravings, Los Caprichos, is what the book ends on (and the title is taken from that of the last Caprichos engraving, Ya es hora).
It is curiously missing in any real sort of character arc -- I mean, Goya keeps talking about how he's progressed in life and thinks about things so differently now, but really he seems to me to be pretty much the same at the end as the beginning, except more battered by life. It's his art that has progressed, though. Instead of a character arc we have an art arc, I guess!
The book also cheerfully uses all the most sensational theories about Goya and the Spanish court possible, with the effect that it is quite compelling but does veer a bit into "wow, this is Very Soap Opera" at times. Basically, everyone is having torrid love affairs with everyone else, and all of that becomes totally relevant to all the politics that's going on. Some of this is attested historically, and some of it is less so. On one hand, Manuel Godoy, the Secretary of State, does appear to have had a close relationship with Queen Maria Luisa (Wikipedia, at least, does not think that there is any direct evidence they were lovers, but at least it's clear there were rumors). But as far as I can tell from Google, Maria Cayetana, Duchess of Alba, did die mysteriously, buuuuut there isn't any evidence at all that she died as a result of a botched abortion of Goya's baby. (Did I mention Very Soap Opera?? Yeah.)
It's sort of shocking to me that the book ends before any of the War of Spanish Independence, which happens just a few years later (which again, since I know zero Spanish history I just found out about while reading various wiki articles after reading this) or Goya's resulting engravings on The Disasters of War (ditto), although I guess all the signs are there as to what's going to happen -- it's not that different from what Feuchtwanger did in Proud Destiny, where even I know that the French Revolution is going to happen, but he doesn't show it in the book.
Requisite Feuchtwanger things: 1) protagonist is irresistable to the ladies and has multiple women who are crazy about him, check 2) small child dies, check.
Ranking in Feuchtwangers: I think the Josephus trilogy is still my favorite, and Jud Süß is still the one I'm most impressed by, but I did like this quite a bit, especially when I had the visuals to go with it.
E is at church camp and A just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures from the library and has been reading it all evening, so I finally had time to write this up!
This is what I've actually been reading over the last six months/year and why I've been even slower than usual about reading everything else (although I did tell A. I had to take turns with the Hugo novels). For E this was mostly stuff she read for school that she wanted me to read so I could help her with her papers, while for A. this has been books he really likes and wants to... well, he doesn't want to talk to me about them really, he more wants to ask me questions about what parts I liked and whether I thought X was funny and so on.
( American Born Chinese, All American Boys, Frankly in Love, Raisin in the Sun, Keeper of the Lost Cities: 2-9.5, all of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Olympus/etc. series )
I am still working on Magnus Chase, and as I mentioned we just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures (a much more low-key series) from the library, so I do have a few more to go...
This is what I've actually been reading over the last six months/year and why I've been even slower than usual about reading everything else (although I did tell A. I had to take turns with the Hugo novels). For E this was mostly stuff she read for school that she wanted me to read so I could help her with her papers, while for A. this has been books he really likes and wants to... well, he doesn't want to talk to me about them really, he more wants to ask me questions about what parts I liked and whether I thought X was funny and so on.
( American Born Chinese, All American Boys, Frankly in Love, Raisin in the Sun, Keeper of the Lost Cities: 2-9.5, all of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Olympus/etc. series )
I am still working on Magnus Chase, and as I mentioned we just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures (a much more low-key series) from the library, so I do have a few more to go...
Hugo novels
Jun. 20th, 2025 09:31 amI have now read the Hugo novel nominees, where by "read" I mean "DNF'd two of them" -- Ministry of Time, Service Model, Alien Clay, Tainted Cup, Someone You Can Build a Nest In (I read in this order).
In the reverse order of how much I liked them:
The Tainted Cup (Bennett) - 4/5 - this book is set in an Empire continually threatened by giant leviathans every year, and in which they have discovered how to do all kinds of biological manipulations. Dinios "Din" Kol is an engraver, a person who has been biologically modified to have a perfect memory; he works for the brilliant investigator Anagosa "Ana" Dolabra, who has her own set of personal idiosyncracies. As the book starts, Din is investigating a murder, but the murder rapidly expands to involve a larger set of deaths and a larger set of power structures within the Empire.
ase pointed out that of all the nominees this is in some ways the most traditional-Hugo one (concentrating heavily on worldbuilding and plot) and yeah, I am That Traditional Hugo Voter. I loved this book, which first of all had a great premise, but also I felt had a precision and detail that I really enjoy in both the worldbuilding and the murder mystery. All the clues were right there (some were more obvious than others), and I even picked up a few of them, although not enough of them that I really had any idea what was going on (I would have had to pay a lot better attention, for one thing). The worldbuilding is really detailed and interesting to me, and the mystery is one that is centered right in the worldbuilding in a lot of different ways, which I find really cool.
I also have as a long-standing complaint about media in general that whenever there's an unequal partnership, the person in the position of intellectual power, the chess-player who is the mover and placer of the pawn(s) on the boards, is always a man -- though the other person in the partnership may be a woman. And I was charmed to see that reversed here, with Ana being the mover and placer.
I could imagine someone not loving this book because Ana and Din do work within the structures of an Empire that is pretty clearly extremely imperfect and rife with corruption, even if Ana does give a rousing speech about how her duty is to try to root out the corruption. I do think that some of how I feel about it will depend on further books in the series and how they deal with that. But either way, I very much appreciated the complexity of how many if not all the characters turn out to be various shades of gray; the "good" characters are still working in a corrupted system, and at the same time, one can usually understand why the "bad" characters do the bad things that they do, often as reactions to that same system.
I also kind of loved that the solution to the mystery turned on bureaucracy and also on a giant money-making scheme. That's so... plausible.
I loved this one enough that I'm immediately picking up the next one at the library. Which other Bennetts should I read? I started City of Stairs but never got very far -- but maybe I should have forged onward a bit more?
The Ministry of Time (Bradley) - 3+/5 - In which various people are brought through time to a near-future Britain and are acclimatized to modern life by living with a government-admin "bridge" -- most particularly Graham Gore, a nineteenth-century Arctic explorer, and his bridge, the unnamed narrator, who is a woman with a British father and Cambodian mother. Meanwhile, there are attacks that appear to be related to the time traveling...
I was confused while reading this book for a long time. The author seemed to have a pretty clear idea on how Gore's mind would have worked, historically speaking, which meant I had no idea why anything was set up the way it was -- why is Gore's bridge a mixed-race woman, why are they living alone together in a house, none of this makes sense -- until the romance started, and then I finished the book and read the afterwards, and ohhhhh, okay, it started life as a fanfic, and all of that was basically the setup to get the ship together, yeah, I get it now, I have written that fic too where the justification for throwing the ship together made, uh, minimal sense. (To be fair, there are some plot-relevant justifications for the setup of the Ministry that only get revealed near the end, and I thought that part was neat.)
All this being said, if one accepts the implausible setup, everything else that followed was interesting, and I did find the book compelling enough that I was eager to read it all the way through. I definitely liked it more than the average Hugo finalist this time out!
Service Model (Tchaikovsky) - 3/5 - A robot butler puts himself out of work and goes on a road trip, occasionally accompanied, to try to find humans to give him more work. It was fine and quite readable (Charles, as the robot butler starts out being called, is a reasonably engaging POV), although I felt like it could probably have been wrapped up in a novella or even novelette -- I felt like the road trip went on and on without adding very much value, and then suddenly all the plot (which I enjoyed!) happened in like the last five percent. One of those angry books about how terrible modern society and human beings are. It's not that I disagree, it's just that it is a bit wearisome to read a whole book about it.
Someone You Can Build a Nest In (Wiswell) - DNF - a tale told from the POV of the monster Shesheshen, who likes to eat humans. This wasn't a bad book, it would probably have gotten at least a 3/5 if I'd finished it, but I made the mistake of not tackling it until after having read The Tainted Cup. Nest just doesn't have that kind of complexity at all, by which I mostly mean the characters. (I also don't think the worldbuilding and plot is nearly as complex and interesting either, but I didn't read far enough for those things to bother me as much.) In Nest, there are definitely Bad characters whose only function is to be so over-the-top obnoxious that we cheer when Shesheshen eats them. I also was annoyed by the character-worldbuilding in which Shesheshen knows just enough about humans to be able to be all self-righteous about how annoying and hypocritical humans are. (Monsters, as far as I can tell, are totally great. Like, they eat their parent and siblings and all, but that's cool, that's just the way they are.) Idk, maybe I was brought up on too much Tiptree, I would have liked her to be a little more, well, alien than to be able to discourse on humans being hypocritical (which to my mind presupposes a reasonably sophisticated understanding of human behavior). But yeah, I should have read it around the same time as Service Model, I would have been able to finish it then.
Alien Clay (Tchaikovsky) - DNF - I can't even make it through the first chapter, I am not sure why. There's something about the narrative voice that I just really am having a hard time getting past.
Hugo novels: Tainted Cup > Sorceress > Ministry of Time > Service Model > Nest > Alien Clay
In the reverse order of how much I liked them:
The Tainted Cup (Bennett) - 4/5 - this book is set in an Empire continually threatened by giant leviathans every year, and in which they have discovered how to do all kinds of biological manipulations. Dinios "Din" Kol is an engraver, a person who has been biologically modified to have a perfect memory; he works for the brilliant investigator Anagosa "Ana" Dolabra, who has her own set of personal idiosyncracies. As the book starts, Din is investigating a murder, but the murder rapidly expands to involve a larger set of deaths and a larger set of power structures within the Empire.
ase pointed out that of all the nominees this is in some ways the most traditional-Hugo one (concentrating heavily on worldbuilding and plot) and yeah, I am That Traditional Hugo Voter. I loved this book, which first of all had a great premise, but also I felt had a precision and detail that I really enjoy in both the worldbuilding and the murder mystery. All the clues were right there (some were more obvious than others), and I even picked up a few of them, although not enough of them that I really had any idea what was going on (I would have had to pay a lot better attention, for one thing). The worldbuilding is really detailed and interesting to me, and the mystery is one that is centered right in the worldbuilding in a lot of different ways, which I find really cool.I also have as a long-standing complaint about media in general that whenever there's an unequal partnership, the person in the position of intellectual power, the chess-player who is the mover and placer of the pawn(s) on the boards, is always a man -- though the other person in the partnership may be a woman. And I was charmed to see that reversed here, with Ana being the mover and placer.
I could imagine someone not loving this book because Ana and Din do work within the structures of an Empire that is pretty clearly extremely imperfect and rife with corruption, even if Ana does give a rousing speech about how her duty is to try to root out the corruption. I do think that some of how I feel about it will depend on further books in the series and how they deal with that. But either way, I very much appreciated the complexity of how many if not all the characters turn out to be various shades of gray; the "good" characters are still working in a corrupted system, and at the same time, one can usually understand why the "bad" characters do the bad things that they do, often as reactions to that same system.
Major spoilers
I also kind of loved that the solution to the mystery turned on bureaucracy and also on a giant money-making scheme. That's so... plausible.
I loved this one enough that I'm immediately picking up the next one at the library. Which other Bennetts should I read? I started City of Stairs but never got very far -- but maybe I should have forged onward a bit more?
The Ministry of Time (Bradley) - 3+/5 - In which various people are brought through time to a near-future Britain and are acclimatized to modern life by living with a government-admin "bridge" -- most particularly Graham Gore, a nineteenth-century Arctic explorer, and his bridge, the unnamed narrator, who is a woman with a British father and Cambodian mother. Meanwhile, there are attacks that appear to be related to the time traveling...
I was confused while reading this book for a long time. The author seemed to have a pretty clear idea on how Gore's mind would have worked, historically speaking, which meant I had no idea why anything was set up the way it was -- why is Gore's bridge a mixed-race woman, why are they living alone together in a house, none of this makes sense -- until the romance started, and then I finished the book and read the afterwards, and ohhhhh, okay, it started life as a fanfic, and all of that was basically the setup to get the ship together, yeah, I get it now, I have written that fic too where the justification for throwing the ship together made, uh, minimal sense. (To be fair, there are some plot-relevant justifications for the setup of the Ministry that only get revealed near the end, and I thought that part was neat.)
All this being said, if one accepts the implausible setup, everything else that followed was interesting, and I did find the book compelling enough that I was eager to read it all the way through. I definitely liked it more than the average Hugo finalist this time out!
Service Model (Tchaikovsky) - 3/5 - A robot butler puts himself out of work and goes on a road trip, occasionally accompanied, to try to find humans to give him more work. It was fine and quite readable (Charles, as the robot butler starts out being called, is a reasonably engaging POV), although I felt like it could probably have been wrapped up in a novella or even novelette -- I felt like the road trip went on and on without adding very much value, and then suddenly all the plot (which I enjoyed!) happened in like the last five percent. One of those angry books about how terrible modern society and human beings are. It's not that I disagree, it's just that it is a bit wearisome to read a whole book about it.
Someone You Can Build a Nest In (Wiswell) - DNF - a tale told from the POV of the monster Shesheshen, who likes to eat humans. This wasn't a bad book, it would probably have gotten at least a 3/5 if I'd finished it, but I made the mistake of not tackling it until after having read The Tainted Cup. Nest just doesn't have that kind of complexity at all, by which I mostly mean the characters. (I also don't think the worldbuilding and plot is nearly as complex and interesting either, but I didn't read far enough for those things to bother me as much.) In Nest, there are definitely Bad characters whose only function is to be so over-the-top obnoxious that we cheer when Shesheshen eats them. I also was annoyed by the character-worldbuilding in which Shesheshen knows just enough about humans to be able to be all self-righteous about how annoying and hypocritical humans are. (Monsters, as far as I can tell, are totally great. Like, they eat their parent and siblings and all, but that's cool, that's just the way they are.) Idk, maybe I was brought up on too much Tiptree, I would have liked her to be a little more, well, alien than to be able to discourse on humans being hypocritical (which to my mind presupposes a reasonably sophisticated understanding of human behavior). But yeah, I should have read it around the same time as Service Model, I would have been able to finish it then.
Alien Clay (Tchaikovsky) - DNF - I can't even make it through the first chapter, I am not sure why. There's something about the narrative voice that I just really am having a hard time getting past.
Hugo novels: Tainted Cup > Sorceress > Ministry of Time > Service Model > Nest > Alien Clay
The Incandescent (Tesh)
May. 20th, 2025 08:34 pm4+/5. ( Cut for length and at least one random aside; no spoilers. )
( Not sure about that one minor spoilery thing. )
Anyway...hidden_variable and K, I spent this entire book thinking, you should absolutely and positively read this book!! (And many of the rest of you should too -- crystalpyramid, I think this is also directly relevant to your interests -- though I also don't think everyone who liked SDG will like it.)
( Not sure about that one minor spoilery thing. )
Anyway...
hidden_variable and K, I spent this entire book thinking, you should absolutely and positively read this book!! (And many of the rest of you should too -- crystalpyramid, I think this is also directly relevant to your interests -- though I also don't think everyone who liked SDG will like it.)Romance books (one with gore)
May. 11th, 2025 01:30 pmHey heeeey Hugo books are out and although I am feeling kind of unmotivated for most of the categories, I might actually end up reading some of the novels. In the meantime I am researching romance novels for Reasons (beta reasons) and have read some romance or romance-adjacent books, one of which doubles as Hugo reading.
( Romancing the Beat (nonfic), Yours Truly, The Friend-Zone Experiment, A Sorceress Comes to Call )
( Romancing the Beat (nonfic), Yours Truly, The Friend-Zone Experiment, A Sorceress Comes to Call )
Odyssey Books 1-3 (trans. Wilson)
Mar. 22nd, 2025 09:58 amI have not read the Odyssey since I was in middle school, and (as will rapidly become clear) I remember basically nothing about the poem itself, although I'm familiar with all the elements of the story. Thanks to selenak, I'm reading the Emily Wilson translation, which I'm enjoying! I had a lot of fun with my Aeneid read a while back, and in the interest of spurring Classics salon discussion I am gonna semi-liveblog my Odyssey read too.
I have not yet read any of the copious intro notes (which I always enjoy) as I didn't want to be spoiled for this, uh, thousands-of-years-old epic. I'll read them at the end, remind me if I don't!
( Books 1-3: Don't tell me about a complicated man, tell me about his son. )
selenak, I'm reading the Emily Wilson translation, which I'm enjoying! I had a lot of fun with my Aeneid read a while back, and in the interest of spurring Classics I have not yet read any of the copious intro notes (which I always enjoy) as I didn't want to be spoiled for this, uh, thousands-of-years-old epic. I'll read them at the end, remind me if I don't!
( Books 1-3: Don't tell me about a complicated man, tell me about his son. )
Life After Life (Atkinson)
Mar. 7th, 2025 10:48 pmThree people recced this to me after I posted about My Real Children, and the library had it, and then I was dragging my feet posting about it but then hidden_variable posted comparing My Real Children and Life After Life (post has spoilers for MRC, no spoilers for LAL) so, uh, here we are.
The idea of this book is that Ursula lives her life over and over again -- though she seems to learn a bit each time. She dies as a baby, strangled by the cord wrapped around her neck. Then she starts over, and this time (how?) the doctor comes and cuts the cord, but then she drowns as a small child. Then she starts over, and falls off the roof. And so on. Ursula doesn't remember anything exactly from iteration to iteration, but she does carry with her some kind of emotional response to her previous lives, so for example the next life after falling off the roof, she decides that going on the roof is a Very Bad idea.
I found the book fascinating as well as often rather hard to read (emotionally speaking). At some point I started flipping forward to find the next time that Ursula died so that I would know what I was signing up for in this iteration. (The life iterations do start getting longer once Ursula hits adolescence -- I guess there are more ways for small kids to die than there are ways for adults to die, although Ursula does manage to find a few.) The influenza section was particularly hard to read, because I guess it was just very likely for her to die from that, so there were a lot of lives, over and over again, where she would die from influenza, and often her siblings would too, and it just sucked a lot.
I thought about this book a lot after finishing it. I didn't get it on first reading, which frustrated me. (I'm still not sure that I get it, but at least I have thoughts on what's going on.)
( Spoilers. )
Anyway -- well -- I will say that this is a hard book to read if you have any sensitivities around child death (I don't particularly, and I still found it hard to read in that respect!) but I liked it and it definitely made me think!
hidden_variable posted comparing My Real Children and Life After Life (post has spoilers for MRC, no spoilers for LAL) so, uh, here we are.The idea of this book is that Ursula lives her life over and over again -- though she seems to learn a bit each time. She dies as a baby, strangled by the cord wrapped around her neck. Then she starts over, and this time (how?) the doctor comes and cuts the cord, but then she drowns as a small child. Then she starts over, and falls off the roof. And so on. Ursula doesn't remember anything exactly from iteration to iteration, but she does carry with her some kind of emotional response to her previous lives, so for example the next life after falling off the roof, she decides that going on the roof is a Very Bad idea.
I found the book fascinating as well as often rather hard to read (emotionally speaking). At some point I started flipping forward to find the next time that Ursula died so that I would know what I was signing up for in this iteration. (The life iterations do start getting longer once Ursula hits adolescence -- I guess there are more ways for small kids to die than there are ways for adults to die, although Ursula does manage to find a few.) The influenza section was particularly hard to read, because I guess it was just very likely for her to die from that, so there were a lot of lives, over and over again, where she would die from influenza, and often her siblings would too, and it just sucked a lot.
I thought about this book a lot after finishing it. I didn't get it on first reading, which frustrated me. (I'm still not sure that I get it, but at least I have thoughts on what's going on.)
( Spoilers. )
Anyway -- well -- I will say that this is a hard book to read if you have any sensitivities around child death (I don't particularly, and I still found it hard to read in that respect!) but I liked it and it definitely made me think!
My Real Children (Walton)
Jan. 14th, 2025 10:20 pm4/5. When ase found out I was writing about multiple universes for Yuletide, she asked if I'd read this. I had not, though I knew vaguely that it was about dual universes. I got it out from the library, not super planning to read it right away, and immediately fell head-first into it. I can't really even tell you why it was so compelling -- the first chapter is from the point of view of a woman, Patricia, who has worsening dementia in the year 2015, which I feel like shouldn't be compelling me to read it! And yet it was immensely compelling and I couldn't stop. I think that some other of Walton's books that I've read -- looking at you, The Just City and Lent -- have this aura of "idea-book" to me, where Walton is cheerfully working out a specific idea -- and don't get me wrong! I love those! But sometimes they can feel to me like they are all about the idea, whereas this one felt very real and moving and grounded to me, and because of that I think is my favorite Walton I've read.
The book traces her journey from a kid (born in 1926) to the point (as a young woman) where she makes a choice, whether or not to marry Mark, a rather disagreeable young man whom she nevertheless thinks she's in love with. The universe in which she does marry him and the universe in which she does not splits herself into two, and then follows the two versions of herself through their lives in alternating chapters. (They helpfully call themselves Pat and Trish -- I was amused that I independently had come up with the same necessity for having different names in the two timelines.)
( I guess mild spoilers? )
I found all of this fascinating and emotional and sometimes heartbreaking, both the personal stories (and not just the differences between their lives, but the quite different people that Pat and Trish become) and the slowly accelerating changes in both universes, although to be honest I flagged a little near the end of the book where I had some trouble keeping all the children and grandchildren straight. But maybe that was thematic, because that's the point at which Pat and Trish both start getting dementia. (Not a spoiler, as we know this from the first chapter.)
( spoilers )
ase found out I was writing about multiple universes for Yuletide, she asked if I'd read this. I had not, though I knew vaguely that it was about dual universes. I got it out from the library, not super planning to read it right away, and immediately fell head-first into it. I can't really even tell you why it was so compelling -- the first chapter is from the point of view of a woman, Patricia, who has worsening dementia in the year 2015, which I feel like shouldn't be compelling me to read it! And yet it was immensely compelling and I couldn't stop. I think that some other of Walton's books that I've read -- looking at you, The Just City and Lent -- have this aura of "idea-book" to me, where Walton is cheerfully working out a specific idea -- and don't get me wrong! I love those! But sometimes they can feel to me like they are all about the idea, whereas this one felt very real and moving and grounded to me, and because of that I think is my favorite Walton I've read. The book traces her journey from a kid (born in 1926) to the point (as a young woman) where she makes a choice, whether or not to marry Mark, a rather disagreeable young man whom she nevertheless thinks she's in love with. The universe in which she does marry him and the universe in which she does not splits herself into two, and then follows the two versions of herself through their lives in alternating chapters. (They helpfully call themselves Pat and Trish -- I was amused that I independently had come up with the same necessity for having different names in the two timelines.)
( I guess mild spoilers? )
I found all of this fascinating and emotional and sometimes heartbreaking, both the personal stories (and not just the differences between their lives, but the quite different people that Pat and Trish become) and the slowly accelerating changes in both universes, although to be honest I flagged a little near the end of the book where I had some trouble keeping all the children and grandchildren straight. But maybe that was thematic, because that's the point at which Pat and Trish both start getting dementia. (Not a spoiler, as we know this from the first chapter.)
( spoilers )
Kairos/Chronos books (L'Engle)
Jan. 2nd, 2025 07:51 pmOkay, so now I can FINALLY post about how this fall I did the deep dive through a whoooooole bunch of L'Engle's books!
( There turn out to be a lot of Kairos and Chronos books. )
( There turn out to be a lot of Kairos and Chronos books. )
Muuuuuusic
Dec. 19th, 2024 09:57 amAll the music people around me have been chunking the month in weeks. Get through this week; regroup, learn the music for next week; get through next week. It is December. Last week was the big week; one more week to go, but relatively light. (Which is good, because the Yuletide deadline was Tuesday and this is, uh, the second latest I've ever turned in my draft.)
( Me, grading the music I've had to do in the past month: )
( Me, grading the music I've had to do in the past month: )
