tabacoychanel

( stuff i read )

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018) I know nothing about the Troubles. Ok, I knew somebody died in prison while on hunger strike. Did I retain any knowledge of the Troubles after imbibing this virtuoso feat of four-year investigative journalism? Probably not, but I have a new autobuy author (Keefe’s next book is on the opioid crisis). In fantasy and science fiction we tell so many stories about overthrowing oppressive regimes, but what if the regime is merely fought to a standstill? Where does resistance bleed into accommodation? How does a populace of ordinary people reckon with the trauma of decades of occupation & collaboration, how do they ratify what is justice when there is no Truth & Reconciliation Commission? This book is a slow burn but so worth it. I lol’d at the academics who didn’t consult the legal department before amassing a trove of sensitive tape recordings wherein (still alive! unincarcerated!) Irish people confessed to actual crimes. This base incompetence results in the book’s dramatic opening sequence, the police raid on the Boston College sealed vault containing these tapes. Tapes which are the foundation of this reporting project. “Hughes had taken to telling people, ‘There was a time in my life when I would have taken a bullet for Gerry Adams. Now, I’d put one in him.’” “In the symbolic calculus of IRA politics, in which every funeral is a stage, Adams could afford to dissasociate himself from Hughes in life, but not in death.” “People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast anymore, apart from wakes.”

Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures (2023) Everything a young adult novel can and should be: This book is a thing of wonder. Early on the adolescent protagonists’ grandfather says to him “It was your father’s idea” and he protests, “But why should he get to decide?” which is the nub of it, isn’t it? Why should the grownups get to decide? Much later:

Christopher couldn’t breathe. He thought of his father, always so afraid, always anxiously holding the world at bay. It seemed in that moment that the had been right to be afraid, and Christopher had been wrong. Nothing in the world was safe.

Christopher’s father never even appears onstage. He’s not even a tertiary character. But this shift in how Christopher perceives the world could not have occurred if he had not disobeyed his father and gone on an adventure. The actual adventure involves Christopher falling through a portal and cavorting with griffins and nereids and centaurs, sailing a magic boat, the bad guys hot on his heels. And he meets Mal. The narrative alternates between their two POVs but it’s more Christopher’s story than Mal’s, since he has the clearer arc. Christopher and Mal are two kids who click right away and within an hour of meeting each other they’re both like “I would die for them!!” I was seized by an urge to reread His Dark Materials or rewatch Avatar: The Last Airbender because yes the fate of the world is in these kids’ hands but the beating heart of the story is the strength of their regard for each other. The process of saving the world forges their relationship, and that relationship is the thing worth saving. Anyway Rundell’s prose is sublime, she also wrote this bestselling biography of John Donne that’s been sitting on my shelf for ages. People who can switch between genres on a dime like that have my entire respect.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elder Race (2021) It’s not exactly revolutionary to observe that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Tchaikovsky does something quite clever by juxtaposing the POV of the medieval warrior-princess with the POV of the “wizard” (aka anthropologist tasked with studying her civilization), whose aid she beseeches to vanquish a monster from the forest. The story moves along at a nice clip, and it’s clearly not Tchaikovsky’s magnum opus or anything, but what impressed me was his attentiveness to both characters’ motivations for embarking on this quest. See, I already knew Tchaikovsky was clever. I worried that he would spend a bunch of pages explaining the science behind the shadowy threat, but no, he’s wise enough to omit it. Instead, Elder Race involves a hilarious misunderstanding in which the princess thinks there’s some great foe who stalks the wizard when the “foe” in question is just his clinical depression which he suppresses by keeping his emotions turned off. Yay cyborg augments! Once in a while our anthropologist must let his emotions bleed out and then his brain goes straight to: “What good is anything I’ve done add what good is anything I am, when nobody’s coming back for me, and when nothing I have is of any relevance to any other human being on this planet?” Waahhhh, Tchaikovsky is at his best when he’s writing about how humans can’t function without purpose.

Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (2025) Professor Palmer’s eight-hundred-page doorstopper of a popular history is exactly the thing I needed to augment my reading of her far-future sci-fi series, Terra Ignota. If neither of those things sounds like they’re for you, don’t worry, let me get on my soapbox and I promise you’ll be both entertained and edified. When I was in undergrad I was assigned Machiavelli’s The Prince, which I took to be a rather cynical manual for statecraft and it did not leave a huge impression on me. Palmer, a Florence specialist, spends her first chapter on Machiavelli and it moved me to tears—did I mention this book is eight hundred pages including endnotes?? This was chapter one. Ada Palmer is a certified genius; the problem is she’s playing twelve-dimensional chess and you need your wits about you to appreciate the scope of what she’s doing. Palmer’s superpower: curating examples. In Chapter 3, “Time for a Tangent About Vikings!” she introduces us to a case study in how historians can get it really, really wrong. Palmer’s book is about the Renaissance, but again and again she uses “Did Greenland settlers eat fish?” as a shorthand for certain “live” issues in Renaissance scholarship—a much bigger, more unwieldy field than North American Norse history. Another useful shorthand she deploys: Homerian epithets. In the vein of “swift-footed Achilles” and “Hector breaker of horses,” she gives us “phoenix-brief Pico” and “Battle Pope Julius” and “Cardinal ‘my parrot speaks Latin’ Sforza.” These sorts of mnemonic crutches are invaluable to a lay reader navigating an era when it was not uncommon for fully one-third of the College of Cardinals to all be named Giovanni.

The key to this book, structurally, is that Palmer walks us through the historiography of the Renaissance before circling back to dissect the events proper. She says: Look at the way nineteenth-century Europe and its imperial ambitions looked to the Renaissance as the cradle of “democracy”! Look at how our own secular age locates the origins of “atheism” in the Renaissance! She wants us to see how ideas affect events. She wants us to see the connections between them, not to memorize a passel of names and dates by rote. Palmer’s not saying her version of events is the objective one; she’s saying there’s no objective account because “history” is a story before it is a collection of facts. We are forever assembling the facts to fit the story we’re invested in. This is not to say, when we’re collating facts, there aren’t better and worse forms of evidence, of course.

I cannot say enough good things about Ada Palmer, the flower of our public intellectuals, a speculative fiction author of astounding vision. And her humor! In this book Ada dismisses some podunk backwater as a mere “two-gelateria town,” discusses the “good gay emperors” of Rome and also Assassin’s Creed. Please read it. I have been to Florence four times; I am married to a native son of Florence; I got soooooo much out of Ada’s account and there are things I will look at differently next time I go back. Let’s end on the most Ada passage ever:

It could be easy to feel that our brilliant, peacemaking princess’s life and efforts came to naught, since she herself suffered so much, and both the families she was supposed to link were overthrown not long after her death. But we get another sense when we zoom in. Years of peace—even one year of peace—is a precious thing within a lifetime. Ippolita Maria spent twenty-three years in Naples, a substantial diplomatic career, and during that time she did (a bunch of stuff) …. The world does not stay saved, but to save it three times is no small achievement.

Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971) I think Le Guin being an ideas-first writer grates against the grain of my brain, so I will never love her on a gut level, but this is my very favorite of her work—judged against The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, both of which I am glad I read but did not enjoy the process of reading. Being ideas-first doesn’t mean ideas-only: she doesn’t just inveigh “the ends never justify the means” and exit stage left! This is the story of a man whose dreams can alter reality. George Orr is a middling man at a middling job just muddling his way along in an overpopulated, oversurveilled near-future dystopia. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about Orr and that is by design. The real star of the show is the larger-than-life figure of his psychiatrist, Dr Haber, who has the bright idea of harnessing Orr’s reality-warping powers to fix the world. What could possibly go wrong?

I want to register that the sort of eucatastrophe envisioned by people in the 1970s—whether that’s climate crisis or social collapse—is so refreshingly alien from the strains we’re used to imagining here in the 2020s. Later in the book actual aliens even appear, and they are ...incomprehensible. Like, Octavia Butler levels of strange. The aliens are part of the seismic transformations the world undergoes every time George Orr has a dream. A world we mostly glimpse dimly, through the window of Dr Haber’s office in Portland, Oregon. Le Guin is deeply attached to Portland. I think this book needed that strong sense of place to ground it because its subject matter is so abstruse. Le Guin asks: Are humans a part of the world, or are we apart from it & acting upon it?

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS The thing that kept me turning pages was the question: What fresh hell has Dr Haber unleashed with each new iteration of reality?? He hypnotizes Orr and makes suggestions in the trance state. He won’t tell Orr beforehand what changes he’s going to implement, so when Orr wakes up he rushes to the window to see if there’s a been a plague (overpopulation solved!) or alien invasion (war in the Middle East solved!). Here is a passage from Dr Haber’s POV that really stuck with me:

Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man? Why was Orr so sure and so right, while the strong, active, positive man was powerless, forced to try to use, even to obey, the weak tool?

Recommend pairing with: Sandra Newman’s The Heavens.

Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood (1984) Can a man write a really good Gothic novel? Maybe, but not this man. I’ll give him full marks for the atmosphere of creeping unease. The problem is the story features the narrator, his brother, and his father all falling head over heels for the same woman. A woman, by the way, whom the men have conjured into existence via the McGuffin that powers the plot. The woman is a product of the woods. I can see that the woodland is what Holdstock is really interested in, this parcel of unchanging virgin wilderness that resists every attempt to know it (the narrator commissions a plane to do aerial mapping, the plane is grounded by a freak storm). At one point during the rising action, oak trees actually explode through the floorboards of his house. The novel packs a wallop of a psychological punch, but for me, a woman in 2025, it was unpleasant to spend so much time inside the mind of someone who assumes 1) women can withhold sex therefore 2) women hold ALL the power in hetero relationships. I mean, it won the World Fantasy Award, I’m not saying there’s nothing of value here but it was hard going for me.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup (2024)(Shadow of the Leviathan #1) The empire hangs its most vulnerable out to dry. Every empire does this. But every empire also exists for a reason; in this case there are colossal leviathans clambering out of the ocean each storm season, against which the Empire has built a series of concentric walls. The well-resourced are able to retreat behind the Inner walls but our story is mostly concerned with peripheral folks solving murders on the periphery, under imminent threat of encroaching leviathans. Bennett leans into his considerable strengths (astounding worldbuilding! twisty plot!) and papers over his characterization weaknesses by going for a timeless Holmes & Watson detective duo. Ana is our Holmes and she is cast in the mold of an Elementary Holmes, not a House or BBC Sherlock Holmes. There is a basic decency to her. Yes, her synapses fire 200x faster than yours or mine, and she’s liable to do recreational drugs out of boredom if an interesting case hasn’t fallen in her lap lately, but she cares if other people get hurt. Din is Ana’s sturdy, wet-behind-the-ears, I’m-not-even-allowed to carry-a-real-sword apprentice, and he is our POV. I gotta say it was pretty satisfying to watch Din dispatch a nest of brigands with his wooden practice sword. The reason Din can do this is that he, like lots of other professionals, has been augmented with special abilities to help him do his job. The casual acceptance of biological engineering in this preindustrial society is …pretty wild and slightly sinister. Robert Jackson Bennett sure knows how to pace a trilogy! I have so many questions about 1) the Empire and 2) how organic augmentations work.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (2024) Everyone has a phase as a teenager when they’re really into something. Well, what if the (170 years dead!) object of your adolescent obsession showed up, in the flesh, in your living room? What if your entire job was to keep an eye on him, help him get acclimated, keep him complaisant? Enter Commander Graham Gore, an officer and a gentleman. You know when an author is so in love with a fictional character that even you want to fuck him because the infatuation bleeds through the page? I kept expecting Graham to chain-smoke his way into my living room and explain why he was more impressed by germ theory than television. This book had me squealing it was so funny and the prose so exquisitely wrought. While I was reading it absorbed me utterly. After I put it down the larger SFF scaffolding around time travel appeared fairly flimsy, like it was tacked on as an afterthought. It’s an incredibly iddy book, and if it’s not an id-match for you then understandable to give it a pass, but bear with me while I tell you why it works. I’m obsessed with the ways masculinity and caretaking are and aren't compatible; Graham’s from a different era and he has totally different hangups than modern men do. Plus, the supporting cast adds so much depth: One traveler plucked from the Black Plague, one from the trenches of WWI. Arthur and Maggie feel almost as solid and real as Graham, and I would read another 400 pages chronicling the group’s antics. In contrast our nameless protagonist feels rather thin. She’s a mixed-race British woman (her mother a Cambodian refugee) who’s toiled her whole life in the bowels of the bureaucracy. To some extent this is the story of her working through her own complicity in “the System” and if her journey had ended more satisfactorily I would have had no qualms voting this for Best Novel. At the end of the day I think this is a book geared toward a certain kind of reader, someone of the Professional Managerial Class, someone with a lot of education but not a lot of power, someone whose broadly leftist politics are stymied by the world’s steady march toward fascism. I mean, I am the target demographic! I loved the shit out of the book! And if I’d read it as a fic—it started life as The Terror fanfic—I’d have left my kudos and moved on. But for the biggest award in the genre? I think as spec fic fans we should be aiming higher, and bigger. I voted for The Tainted Cup for Best Novel.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model (2024) Robots: they hold up a mirror to humanity! Not a new idea but executed with great aplomb. I did not expect this robot bildungsroman to turn into a “Universal Basic Income vs. Jobs Guarantee” panel at the climax but I’m kind of glad it did. The sort of systemic collapse envisioned here is always multi-causal, however our POV is an unemployed robot butler who has limited insight into the macro forces at work. He just wants the satisfaction of making a sandwich for an appreciative human, because even robots need a purpose! Here’s the problem: We have one comedian and one straight man, and the dynamic gets stale; the book could have been 150 pages shorter. It was fine but it doesn’t hold a candle to Tchaikovsky’sElder Race, which ought to have won Best Novella in 2021.

T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call(2024) Kingfisher continues to be shockingly bad at imagining the inner lives of her villains and superb at evoking the feeling of being crushed under the villain’s thumb (the titular sorceress can puppeteer people’s bodies). If I sound surprised I guess it’s my own fault for living in an era when every bad guy gets a redemption arc. But this is why Kingfisher’s stories are said to have a fairytale-cast to them: Characters might be flat but she does make you feel viscerally for what they are going through. She chooses for protagonists women and girls with limited power to effect their circumstances. This novel has dual protagonists: a standard middle-aged “my joints ache” spinster, and a pubescent girl who is the sorceress’s daughter. I myself am not an evil sorceress but it still made me cognizant of how easy it is to betray a child’s trust, and how simple to gaslight a child who has no notion what is “normal” or not.

Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower (2019) A crazy unique fantasy I was super impressed by, but would I want to experience it again? Uhh nope. It takes a while to get rolling. You have to trust Leckie as an author, and once you glimpse what she she is doing, that is the inflection point at which the story picks up momentum and then it’s alllllll the way downhill, no force in the world can stop it. Yes, I am intentionally loading up on rock metaphors. Only Ann Leckie would commit to the bananas premise of writing an entire book from the POV of a rock!!!! A rock who is also a god. There are two narrative threads: In the past our POV rock lived in the vast far-northern wilderness; in the present they are chained up at the bottom of the eponymous tower. This invites the question: how did they lose their freedom? For the first half of the book the present-day thread with its heavy palace intrigue was the one I cared more urgently about. At about the halfway point my investment in the two plot threads flip-flopped. Very elegant. Thematically this is a book greatly preoccupied with language and power. Ann Leckie is the kind of person who goes on podcasts to confidently pronounce that a cheesecake is neither a cake nor a pie but actually a sandwhich. Her brain is a national treasure. When it clicked for me the meaning of the word “godspoken” I had to go eat half a bag of chips to digest it properly.

Isabel Cañas, Vampires of El Norte(2019) I wish I could get in a time machine and spoon-feed this book to fifteen-year-old me. It’s exactly the flavor of childhood best friends turned star-crossed lovers that would have set my heart aflutter. Nena and Néstor grew up together on a ranch. She’s the patrón’s daughter and he’s a farmhand. After a long, traumatic separation they are reunited. Here is the problem: The choice isn’t hard enough. I see absolutely no reason Nena doesn’t marry Néstor the instant he reappears. He thought she was dead; she is merely the victim of a very bad miscommunication trope. Everything she cares about is arrayed on one side of this equation. He’s saved up money; they could’ve struck out on their own. Of course if they’d done that we’d not have the remaining three-quarters of the book, wherein they slay vampires but the real vampires are patriarchy and capitalism and Yankees. My major takeaways from this book were: 1) A strong sense of place—Cañas’s family roots are in Texas 2) the yearning between the leads is so good!! it does not surprise me to learn from the Acknowledgements that she has written fanfiction 3) the vampires were so viscerally upsetting I want to see Cañas working in the horror genre proper (in her her next book, The Possession of Alba Díaz).

Rainbow Rowell, Slow Dance (2024) I’ve got a new favorite Rainbow Rowell and it’s a second-chance romance! Nobody is as careful as Rowell at depicting how excruciating intimacy is; these kids were inseparable in high school and now they’re reconnecting for the first time in decades at a mutual friend’s wedding. Rowell manipulates the dual timelines to great effect, plus her dialogue is top-notch. I could tell you “Shiloh is insecure about her own worth” and “Cary’s bad at being vulnerable with his feelings” and that is certainly what happens but how does it happen? How does she do it?? Rowell consistently produces work that is so seamless you can’t reverse-engineer her process. hamsterwoman  actually hit upon the word “seamless” when we were discussing Yeats—idk how her brain leapt from W.B. Yeats to Rainbow Rowell but she’s put her finger on it. I found the pacing of the final quarter of the book slightly wonky, however it’s a very satisfying book and I heartily recommend it as an exemplary chidlhood-BFFs-to-lovers story. There’s one scene when they’re reflecting on why they didn’t get together in high school (they behaved in such a way all their friends thought they were already together) and Cary asks, “How could I have gotten any closer to you than I already was?”

On a thematic note, let’s hear it for more working-class heroes and heroines in our romance! How often do you see a thirtysomething paying his mom’s mortgage not the other way around? How often do you see single motherhood depicted not as a moral failing or an anomaly but the norm? Ditto for multi-generational living? Every time I was at risk of identifying too hard with Shiloh and her overthinking, overplanning “get me out of this sleepy small town” Type A tendencies, she would go and do something to lose the moral high ground. Her objection to the military isn’t a principled antiwar one, the source of it is fear for Cary’s safety. Realistically speaking enlisting was the best option Cary had upon graduating. Damn I’m so glad Rainbow Rowell exists.

Barry Eisler, All the Devils (2019)(Livia Lone #3) Finally a thriller writer whose books work for me!!! I first heard of Eisler as a guest on a lefty podcast where he dug deep into the reactionary assumptions of the political thriller genre. Eisler is a former CIA agent, and his protagonist in this novel is a cop, yet the book itself is not the kind of copaganda/unvarnished military imperialism that makes me throw up. Our heroine, Livia Lone, is a former sex-trafficking victim and a martial arts prodigy and a quite decent cop...when she’s not being a vigilante. Livia will do anything it takes to get justice for other rape victims. This is a very #MeToo book.

Kelly Link, The Book of Love (2024) I felt bad showing up to book club having read only 50%, since I am the one who suggested this title in the first place, but to my immense relief only 1 out of 5 of us had finished the cursed thing and that was only because she was at the beach without access to other reading material. Turns out one way to have a vigorous hour-long discussion is by collectively trashing a book! Kelly Link has a kernel of a fantastic idea but she has trouble sustaining tension at novel length (her short fiction is ofc brilliant). Look: If I told you here are four teenagers and their mysterious teacher and a life-or-death magic test he has set them, would you not expect the existence of a deadline to impart some urgency to the plot? To spur the kids to act or react, somehow? Instead we wander around in circles for 600+ pages. The character voices are very samey, there are too many POVs, and the more I read the madder I got. Where was she going with this?! After we extracted a plot summary from the one member of our book club who had made it to the finish line, we were all scratching our heads like, what a waste of a fine premise. (“We want the prequel about the Anabin x Bogomil friends-to-enemies arc.” “Only if it’s less than a hundred pages long.”) What was the point of all this extraneous cruft like Mo’s grandma being a romance author, and Laura spends a whole chapter picking out a guitar? In fact music was such an important theme and so poorly integrated into the story. If you, like me, have a hankering for a modern Tam Lin retelling featuring adolescents who behave like adolescents and immortal bargains and cycles of trauma, that book already exists and it’s called Tam Lin by Pamela Dean.

Sally Rooney, Normal People (2020) I finally read Sally Rooney and she is Really Good!!! Hottest of hot takes lol. I think the reason she is good is every element pulls in tandem towards the same goal. For instance, there’s the main characters’ political views. These are relatively privileged university-aged kids, they’re nominally socialists but not like, in a way that materially affects anybody’s life. What struck me was how holding political views on idk, Palestine or whatever Marianne was on about at that one dinner party could have been a distraction from the novel’s central concern—intimate relationships are messy and hard!—and it wasn’t, because Sally Rooney does not waste a single word. Every element she introduces pays off. Connell and Marianne are broken in complementary ways—he’s broken on the outside and she’s broken on the inside—and they fit together and they hurt each other and they break up and come together over and over. I just told you the plot but I didn’t really tell you anything about it. I am in awe of the way she writes sex scenes that aren’t hot but not the way bad erotica writers are not hot—she’s doing it very deliberately—and the way she uses time-skips back and forth to control the narrative momentum.

Jo Walton, Lent (2019) At the midway point of this historical novel about Girolamo Savonarola, aka the mad monk of Florence—you know the one who burnt all those books in a bonfire—it transpires that this is actually a speculative fiction novel with the most sff of sff conceits buried at the heart of it: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS a fucking time loop! He’s in a time loop! The way she marries a plot revelation to a characterization moment here is +100 chefs kisses. Savonarola is a demon and when he’s not being reincarnated into a new loop he’s roasting in hell, beyond every hope of salvation. Savonarola, who spent his whole life railing against the Church’s corruption. Savonarola, who thought if he was pious enough he could by sheer force of will preach Florence into a purer city. I’ve read 6 or 7 of Walton’s novels but this is the first one where I stopped and thought: Goddamn, I can see why she’s Ada Palmer’s best friend.

Martha Wells, All Systems Red (2017) (Murderbot #1) It was cute and I liked it, although I’m not sure it hit the spot for me the way it seems to have grabbed a lot of other people.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, The Ones Who Don’t Say I Love You (2021) The first story slapped so hard! It was basically a perfect story. The others oscillated between middling and kind of shoddy; they all center on New Orleans and race and class.

Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (2005) Lamott is really good at what she does! i haven’t read Bird by Bird but now i think i should—personal essay collections are not a genre i generally gravitate toward but i could not but these down.

Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible (2021) (Dreamer Trilogy #2) Did Maggie just write a book with a plot or am I tripping on acid? It provoked in me a lot of thoughts about art and artists. Declan and Jordan take a backseat to Ronan and Hennessy in this one (the way Maggie picked apart Hennessy’s Deep Dark Trauma was more compelling than the way she approached Ronan’s—the climax hinges on both their traumas so it was imperative she get them both right). Matthew my beloved gets his own pov and he is—wow, i had forgotten how hard it is to be a teenager, even when you’re the most easygoing teenager alive. Jordan sort of sets him straight; ofc it sucks that he is literally a supernatural entity dreamed into existence by his brother, but otoh does it suck that much more than the day-to-day trial of existing in the world as a teenager?

Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden (2020) My first outing with Tchaikovsky and I like him! I like the scope of his ideas. There’s a tendency in contemporary SFF to elevate the social sciences above the “harder” sciences but Tchaikovsky is cut from a different cloth, right out the gate he’s like bro lemme tell you about the Permian Extinction. I will say that once we had unraveled the mystery of how these parallel universes function there wasn’t much substance, character- or relationship-wise, to hold my interest. There was a trans character but she just wasn’t that interesting; what was interesting was what other characters’ reactions to her told us about them, which imo speaks to something lacking on the writer’s part.

Jessamine Chen, The School for Good Mothers (2021) Harrowing, as entirely expected, and as other reviewers have noted the middle section dragged—this is the “remedial” school where she has to parent a robot to “prove” she’s a fit mother—and the social commentary was anvil-blunt. By contrast when she goes to court for the custody hearing her lawyer’s entire strategy is “let’s hope the judge sees you as white.” Which does not work in Frida’s case but you can see why it is often a winning strategy!! So much model minority toxicity to unpack. The whole time she’s waiting to appear before the judge there’s an ITV home renovation show running in the background on TV—somebody is replacing their jacuzzi—and meanwhile Frida becomes more and more conscious that she is the only person in the room wearing business casual who’s not an attorney. Everyone else is either 1) lower-class 2) nonwhite or 3) both. That was when the novel was sharpest, the implicit contrast there. Also when she would engage in self-destructive behaviors like sleeping with her ex’s best friend just because she needed to know she was still desirable?? Will is a tool—every man in this book is a tool—but I can’t blame her. She didn’t have any good choices, she’s being asked to perform motherhood to an ever-shifting unattainable standard, she’s being set up for failure at every step. I was initially wary because this is the zeitgeistiest of debuts but it was quite good.

Steven Brust, Issola (2001) (Vlad Taltos #9) “It’s useful, for example, to categorize your target as a sorcerer, if he is one; but if you get too attached to your category it’ll leave you embarrassed when he suddenly pulls a knife on you.” Well Anna this has got to be one of your faves right? Vlad, Morrolan and Aliera negotiate —as far as i can tell—against THEMSELVES in this most fraught of hostage situations. The situation is: they are the hostages. It sounds asinine when I put it like that but Brust has the knack of painting Vlad into the absurdest of corners and then springing a solution that is surprisingly inevitable. The real meat of the story lies not in confronting the baddies but in Vlad’s conversations with Lady Teldra, Morrolan’s Executive Assistant. Teldra is an Issola and they have a reputation for being governed quite rigidly by protocol. In the course of being held hostage with her, Vlad learns that the Issola are not as alien as he supposes them to be; that he in fact has internalized a number of Issola instincts. “It is really all a question of taking appropriate action for the circumstances,” explains Teldra. Teldra goes on to drop the paradigm-shifting revelation that Morrolan was raised as an Easterner, which….makes you reframe everything you think you know about Morrolan doesn’t it? Holy guacamole. “Well, I’ll be—he thought he was human? I mean, Easterner?” says Vlad, and that sentence just about says it all. I’m glad we got those scenes of Vlad rescuing Morrolan and Aliera—comedy gold—and them coming back to rescue him, and I’m glad Vlad finally, before it was too late, learned to recognize Lady Teldra’s value. “There is a subtle but important difference, Vlad, between thinking only of yourself and seeing the world as it affects you” is a damn astute observation. This book isn’t one of my favorites but it definitely does that thing you were talking about, Anna, where you’re climbing a hill and you’re climbing and climbing and all of a sudden you reach a certain spot where you look back at the way you came and the light hits different and you’re like oh because you’ve seen this scene before but now you see it from an entirely new angle.

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) Wow I cried. At first I found the omniscient narrator insufferably patronizing—upper-middle-class people have zero self-awareness, all right, we get it!!! Lay off the moral superiority already. It took me 1/3 of the book before I saw a glimmer of Ng’s compassion. I saw that bourgeois individualism makes people mean and small: It broke my heart that Linda McCullough never told Elena Richardson—her supposed bff!—about her serial miscarriages. Mrs McCullough and Mrs Richardson are the villains of the piece! Insofar as a story like this has villains; you’re definitely rooting against them, anyway. But what I mean is, if Mrs McCullough had been able to share her pain with someone, had been able to lean on her friend instead of zipping everything up inside and pretending to be self-sufficient, would she have been less desperate to go to court for custody of somebody else’s baby? If Mrs Richardson had been less invested in “nothing must disturb the status quo,” would Lexie have felt safe enough to go to her own mother when she needed an abortion, instead of Mia? The asymmetry of what Mia did when Mrs Richardson’s daughter came to her needing an abortion (gave her tea and a place to crash), and what Mrs Richardson did when Mia’s daughter did the same (threw Pearl and Mia out on the street), is making me absolutely feral. Anyway this book made me think a great deal about art as labor, and how artists must labor to procure the time and space to create art. Mia literally became a surrogate because she didn’t have the money to attend art school. But then she kept the baby, and that decision, instead of derailing her photography career, wound up jumpstarting it because Pauline took those “Virgin and Baby” photos of Mia and Pearl, and gifted them to Mia, and Mia was able to sell the photos to buy herself time to make art. The Rabbit was Mia’s brother’s car, but before he bought the car he had offered Mia the money to send her to art school. She refused to take it, but after he died she took the car. One way or another it’s an exchange, you see? Money for time or blood for time. Blood for art. The area I felt the book was weakest was the race stuff: Everything about baby Mirabelle, the McCulloughs being white and the baby’s biological mom being Asian all seemed kind of hamfisted. The thing that hurt me most: Moody’s betrayal. “‘I cannot believe you,’ Izzy had never seen her brother act this way. Moody, who had always been the most thoughtful person in her family; Moody, who had always taken her side even if she chose not to take his advice. Moody, the person in her family she’d always trusted to see things more clearly than she could. ‘You realize,’ she said, ‘that Mom is probably going to blame Mia for all this.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe she should have kept a closer eye on her daughter. Maybe she should have raised her to be more responsible.’” To be clear: Moody is so cut up about being friendzoned by Pearl that he gladly throws his BEST FRIEND to the wolves. Fuck this whole society, I’m glad Izzy burned the house down.

Tana French, The Trespasser (2017) (Dublin Murder Squad #6) “Me and Steve, scrabbling so hard to pull the true story out of the tangle, we forgot the false ones come with their own ferocious, double-edged power.” I’m about to go out and read every word Tana French has ever published, she is that good. It’s a page-turner but not the sort that leaves you feeling you ate an entire bag of chips on autopilot because you weren’t paying attention and now you have a tummyache. Antoinette Conway and Steve Moran are the outcast and the rookie, respectively, of the Dublin Murder Squad: they’re assigned a run-of-the-mill domestic assault case that turns out to be more than it seems. Something pings their cop-spidey-sense and it’s not the case itself; it’s how various people—witnesses, suspects, other cops—react to the case. The sense of offness that suffuses the narrative is immediate and frighteningly effective. The way French resolves all the loose threads; even the prat of a journalist who is stalking Conway has his hour in the sun. The open wound of Conway’s dad, whom she never knew, who left her and her ma before she was born—her dad does not overnight become part of her life but his reappearance is key to a breakthrough in the case. It’s so elegant I could cry. That’s her at her lowest ebb, when she confronts her dad. And she swallows her pride and picks up the phone and calls Steve. I was so proud of her when she did that. Her and Steve just had a blowup. Her paranoia and her persecution complex have made her distrust everyone; she’s spun a story in her head where even Steve, her partner, is out to get her; she is allergic to being “rescued” because it means she’s not in control of her own narrative anymore. She calls Steve and he comes, no questions asked. The way that trusting your partner beyond all logic and sense is at the heart of solving this case—at the heart of why this murder was committed. The way that the stories that buttress our identity are more powerful than the most advanced policework or interrogation technique.

Let’s start with Yuletide, where I received a stupendously well-written Locked Tomb fic featuring my favorite disaster bisexuals Palamedes and Camilla rocking some god-level banter pre-canon: A Beginner’s Guide to Locked Tomb Mysteries by lonelywalker (3k), as well as a delightful treat about Jo/Laurie reconnecting in New York (Little Women 1994): New Day by Missy (400 words).

Locked Tomb was one of the big Yuletide fandoms this year (38 fics i think) and I was beyond thrilled. I think I read them all?? My favorites:

publish or die by intrikate88 (4k) | An epistolary fic centered on Cam & Pal solving a MYSTERY? Sign me the fuck up. It’s an ensemble piece too ft. Abigail, Magnus, Dulcinea. And it really earns that “rigorous publication standards” tag lmao.

Excerpt from Book 22 (lost) of The Noniad by Ortus Nigenad, Cavalier Secondary of the Ninth House by oliviacirce (2k) | Exactly what it says on the tin! Somebody went and wrote a good chunk of Ortus’s unpublished magnum opus and it is A TRIUMPH of storytelling. Half the fun is the framing device of the overworked future!archivist who “discovers” the lost manuscript lol.

ill tidings (no comfort, no joy) by leiascully (3k) | aka the Mercymorn character study that wrecked me. Guys I don’t even care for Mercy as a character but this is incandescently good, and it grapples with the central theme of the Locked Tomb books which is how simultaneously pure and fucked-up the cavalier/necromancer bond is. High, high rec.

Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead by Isis (4k) | An Abigail-centric fic set in the interstices of Harrow the Ninth aka How Abby Figured Out What Was Going On.

Non nobis, Domine by Mainland (6k) | Silas & Colum (well Silas/Colum if you squint) through the years. This pairing is not exactly rainbows and unicorns—we know it’s gonna end badly—but this? This hurt me badly. "I used to worry," Colum said slowly, "what you would do if you were faced by an enemy you hadn't let yourself prepare for." "In that daydream, did you often picture yourself as the one standing in my way?" "I would not,” Colum heaved a sigh, "I am an unbroken vow." Also can we talk about how the life expectancy of Eighth House cavaliers is approximately 35 or thereabouts??? Because hovering in the background of this story is Silas’s dad’s cav and she’s indisposed 99% of the time ‘cause the Master Templar drains her so often. If the Eighth House doesn’t scare you shitless, it jolly well should.

Onwards to the non-Locked-Tomb fic Yuletide recs:

Sense & Sensibility | The More Loving One by DaisyNinjaGirl (5k) | Canon-divergence AU where Elinor marries Colonel Brandon, Edward Ferrars marries Lucy Steele, and Marianne yeets off to Scotland where she is living her best life as a piano teacher. This story feels so textured—in 5k I got a sense of the daily rhythm of village life, and even of Elinor’s relationships with Marianne and Lucy, who hardly appear in it at all. I went so far as to rec it for The Rec Center, which is the first time I’ve ever felt moved to do that—I think this is the kind of fic that would fall right in the wheelhouse of the median Rec Center reader (who I postulate, based on zero data, is older and more omnifannish—as in, fannish by disposition rather than fannish about a specific media property). It’s such an exceedingly generous fic, in the sense that your soul will feel enlarged upon reading it.

Billy Elliot | Homefires by alby-mangroves (4k) | I remember very little about the plot of Billy Elliot but it doesn’t even matter? What a pitch-perfect evocation of the setting (working-class Northern England during the 1984 miners’ strike) and the dialogue is to die for and the ending gave me ALL the warm and fuzzies.

14th c. RPF | honi soit qui mal y pense by betony (2k) | listen i know next to nothing about Edward the Black Prince or Joan of Kent but i will read anything betony writes and the way they write historical RPF with a magical/supernatural bent is peerless.

The Borgias | In the Bleak Midwinter by yeats (2k) | Cesare/Lucrezia seeking shelter from a snowstorm and being mistaken by the castellan for a newlywed couple with a baby?? Love it, love that this fic leans into the messed-up-ness of this family instead of away from it.

Ocean’s 8 | Singing When We’re Winning by meretricula (Debbie/Lou 3k) | Nobody does “aw shit i caught feelings for my best friend” getting-together-fic like meretricula does. I think I was clutching my abdomen from giggling too hard the whole time I was reading this.

Jupiter Ascending | Breathe Me In by captainellie (1k) | A Jupiter/Caine pwp that does a lot of interesting things with the dom/sub dynamics—it’s femdom and it’s really hot obvs but I found myself chewing over the character work more than the actual sex.

Ethan of Athos | What is Man, That Thou Art Mindful of Him? by hellseries (2k) | Ethan/Terrence Cee, post-canon. I never thought about the day-to-day aspects of Terrence adjusting to his new life after he makes the irrevocable decision to immigrate to Athos, but this fic frames the whole adjustment in terms of SCIENCE and it’s perfect.

Uprooted | Woodsmoke on the Wind by taywen (22k) | I enjoy Sarkan/Solya and I actively ship Sarkan/Agnieszka, so what could be better than Solya/Sarkan/Agnieszka ot3? This is set at the Kralian court and the court-intrigue was never my favorite part of Uprooted but I liked how this fic was all about polyamory negotiations and Idiots to Lovers (Agnieszka is not an idiot but the two men sure are).

The Eagle of the Ninth | Aere Perennius by alby-mangrove (4k) | Marcus/Esca get-together fic postcanon! They bought a house together! They’re best friends! Why aren’t they banging yet! This is so soft and careful; it captures not only the tone but the cadence of Sutcliff’s prose.

The Mummy | I.O.U. by GwendolynGrace (13k) | Ardeth/Jonathan, which is a pairing I had never hitherto even considered but one of my favorite things about Yuletide is the reliable crop of high-quality fics you get for evergreen fandoms like The Mummy. This was fantastic. The Jonathan-voice was spot-on and I like that Jonathan’s shortcomings aren’t downplayed—yes he is a coward and dilettante—but he’s also genuinely knowledgeable about Egyptian history and culture, and he really does have feelings for Ardeth (which is why he keeps angling for the latter to serve as his guide every he returns to Egypt to go on a wild goose chase in the desert lol).

As far as what I wrote for Yuletide, I wrote a short (1k) Charlie’s Angel (2019) fic about Sabina & Jane talking Elena through her first solo mission. Tbh the thing I’m proudest of is the setup. The execution …could have been better. My recipient was wonderful and left a lovely comment but I mean, I thought seriously about 1) defaulting because i posted this puppy literally 30 min before the deadline and 2) orphaning it at some point during the anon period, which would’ve been A Bad Look but i just feel terrible for being a victim of my own procrastinating tendencies. Sometimes it works out well! Last year I wrote a fic for Doom (2005) which I am quite proud of, and I slid in right under the wire with that one too. But I cannot shake the feeling that this fic deserved better than me. What I was trying to get across with it is this: Back when mysticalmuddle and I watched the film together she said something that really stuck with me: “main antagonist: bosley. background antagonists: the entire male race.” And that’s it that’s the movie. It connects the dots between the small daily indignities of being a woman to the bigger villainous designs of the men who run the world (and the McGuffin is just a convenient way of showing this). I just wanted our girls to have clever banter, and do some problem-solving each in their own inimitable way, maybe hint at OT3 but that didn’t make it into the fic. It came out pretty unpolished but I think I had a good idea I just didn’t have time to execute it? Lesson learned for next year. This is only the third year I have done Yuletide! I defaulted the first time I tried, back in the mists of time (2010) and was not aware there was a global amnesty in place starting 2013-ish. I was more or less strong-armed into participating in 2018 by meretricula who dragged me out to dim sum (yes she had to force-feed me dim sum too, can you imagine??? isn’t she terrible??) and then she beguiled me into signing up for Yuletide. Whereupon I promptly matched with her and had a grand time. This was three Yuletides ago. I have to admit that a lot of the fun is lurking in comms like coaltide to see what kind of tea is brewing on any given day, because I am a voracious consumer of secondhand drama (for firsthand drama I have a low tolerance). But since Yuletide is the biggest exchange, it exemplifies for me the spirit of fandom-as-gift-economy, and that’s something that means a lot to me.

2020 Fannish Year in Review

According to AO3 I wrote 50k words this year which is…more words than I wrote in the previous 9 years I’ve had an Ao3 account??? It doesn’t feel like I wrote a lot, because I mostly wasn’t writing in fandoms I was actively participating in (as in, regularly consuming fic/edits/meta/vids/headcanons/whatnot). So my fan production and fan consumption bore little relation to each other and that was weird.

I started out the year watching Netflix’s Locke & Key (2020), which my husband had previously watched but he rewatched with me (my husband’s idea of “watching” a show is putting it on in the background while napping). It’s not a good show but I wasn’t watching it ‘cause I thought it’d be good, I watched it because the fine folks on the Consanguinamory Discord server told me the siblings were shippable. And they were! I wrote a short fic, more because “3k outsider POV” is my sweet spot as a writer than because I cared about the canon, and I have to say I have not thought about this show again since.

On the recommendation of the Consanguinamory server I also watched both seasons of The Gifted (2017), which is a X-men spinoff set in some nebulous unspecified timeline. The things I do for the promise of shippable siblings! I wrote a 17k fic, which was the longest thing I’d ever written at that point. And it was uneven—I reread it recently and the rough portions really stood out to me—but by god am I glad I did it. It proved to me that i could, in fact, write a longish thing. And I could definitely see where my weaknesses were (action scenes? pfttt). I also was chuffed by the amount of feedback I got that was just “I wish this story had been about mutant superpowers rather than two teenagers having messy feelings.” Fair enough my dude.

In March we went into lockdown and me and hubby binged all five seasons of Leverage (2008)—an insanely good show that was also perfect for escapism purposes. Y’all know about hubby’s habit of falling asleep on the couch; so when he did that it wasn’t a big deal because he might miss an episode but it’s an episodic show—there are season-long arcs but it’s not actually one long story, the way prestige dramas these days tend to be. In every ep there’s a heist—our mains are thieves—but Robin-Hood-type thieves who are out to take the rich and powerful down a notch (“We pick up where the law leaves off”). For a show that was made a decade ago it sure is awfully prescient. And every! Single! Ep! Ends on a hopeful note. It was the injection of optimism we needed. I think, for me, the best part of this show is the competency porn; it’s how the technology of the headpieces enables them to coach each other in their own areas of expertise (Hardison teaches Eliot how to hack, Eliot teaches Sophie how to talk genuinely to a kid, Parker teaches Hardison to case a joint and lift ID cards, Sophie teaches Parker how to human, Nate teaches Sophie how to outbluff hucksters, Sophie teaches Hardison how to do wine tastings, Hardison teaches Parker & Eliot both on two separate occasions how to defuse a computer-detonated bomb, the entire team teaches Nate how not to be an ass to his ex). And the OT3. The OT3 is the beating heart of this show (sorry Nate & Sophie you're great). I ship it to pieces. There’s no question of work-life balance because their coworkers are their family; the boundaries between friends/family/coworkers are blurred and that’s my jam.

In June I wrote two fics for Jonrya Week. Jon/Arya is my longest-running ship and ASOIAF is my forever fandom and before 2018 (when I started doing Yuletide) everything I’d posted to AO3 was Jonrya, so this was a sandbox I’m pretty comfortable in. The fics themselves were fine—one pwp and one daemon AU (3k outsider pov is my bread&butter lol)—-the daemon AU is a better story than the PWP—but that’s not the important thing! The important thing is I met mysticalmuddle, who also writes Jonrya! You ever meet someone and within 5 minutes you vibe so well together that it’s like you’ve known them forever? That was us, instant kindred spirits. It’s so exhilarating to have a friend with whom I have not only loads of shared interests, but who is older than me in writing years (even though she’s much younger in actual years!) and takes the craft seriously and hashes out problems with me. mysticalmuddle is, upon reflection, most of the reason I wrote so much this year. She encouraged me to tackle the Jonrya regency AU that’s been knocking about in my brain for a while, which is now unfinished at 18k, which is officially the longest thing I’ve written ever and it’s not even halfway done. And when I beta her stuff I learn so much. What a blessing she is.

Ok but the wildest thing that happened to me this year, that I’m going to write about here because it is Jonrya-related is I got anon hate on tumblr! I was upset at the time but now I am just confused. Because usually anon hate is trying to elicit some kind of reaction from you? For the anon’s amusement? Or if you’re a blog with a lot of followers they just flame you for attention. I am not a blog with a lot of followers, and I did not give amusing answers. For context: in ASOIAF the most popular ship (by tumblr and AO3 stats) is Jon/Sansa. It’s a ship that the rest of the fandom holds in disdain, for reasons that aren’t important. What’s important for our purposes is that it’s very uncommon for someone to multiship Jon/Sansa and Jon/Arya; it's just Not Done. (By contrast nobody bats an eye if you multiship Jon/Arya and Gendry/Arya, or Sansa/Margaery and Dany/Sansa).


To recap what happened here: This anon is not mad because I wrote for the wrong ship. They mad because I 
kudos'd the wrong fic, which is something they could only have known if they went digging for this information by combing through the kudos counter at the bottom of the offending fic.

witcherology who is a Jonsa shipper recc'd me a 100k Jonsa fic which I read, and duly left kudos on because that's what civilized people do--they pick up their dog poop and leave kudos on fics they read. Then a rando from the internet comes along and combs through the kudos counter of said Jonsa fic, recognizes my AO3 handle, tracks me down on tumblr where I have an entirely different handle, and leaves this absolutely unhinged message. (It also bugged me because it's counterproductive?? Just on a pragmatic level I wish this person had spent all this energy on writing their own Jonrya fic if they object to my writing so much.) And that was not the end of it! This anon apparently decided to camp out in my inbox:

And this kept happening until I turned off anon asks:

Onto happier topics! One of the great joys of this year is getting into Locked Tomb fandom with cafemassolit, who furnished me a copy of Harrow the Ninth about a month before its publication date (look, I do not question her procurement methods). I had adored Gideon the Ninth and she had begrudgingly enjoyed it, but we were both united in our admiration for Harrow and she has been sending me an endless parade of delightful fanart/memes/meta since. I have since read a good deal of Locked Tomb fic--basically everything Sixth- or Eighth-house centric I have read at least once--and dragged mysticalmuddle into the fandom too, so well done all around lads. I've lately joined The People's Tomb discord server but I'm still acclimating myself over there; it's a bit overwhelming when you first jump in and it's a rapid conversational patter that flies by you and you don't know anybody. A lot of Locked Tomb writers on ao3 apparently congregate there so I thought I'd give it a whirl. (cafemassolit is also a blessing for other reasons, eg. the ludicrous number of care packages she sends me full of bounty like mooncake earrings! Dinosaur-shaped cookie cutters! My husband, eating a ginger snap cookie K sent us: "Why do you get so many parcels?" Me: "Because I have lovely friends." Him: "Wish I got mystery parcels from Europe." Me: "Your parents sent us a five-liter jug of olive oil because America apparently cannot be trusted to manufacture 'real' olive oil.")

I watched The Old Guard (2020) twice, once with bts!sister and once with mysticalmuddle Enjoyed the hell out of it both times, and now #myimmortalfamily is a tumblr tag that I have. (I have two sisters, bts!sister and cat!sister. bts!sister also likes other bands like ateez, exo, black pink but she’s suuuuper plugged into the kpop scene and is on record saying things like “pfttt i don’t listen to english-language music”.)

I finally watched The Untamed (2019) with meretricula (this being her second pass). stultiloquentia joined us for the final few eps. This show was bonkers fucking yonkers. I mean, I knew it was going in, via fandom osmosis, and also because bts!sister got into the fandom last year and has been nattering at me about it ever since. It’s a show that will reach into your ribcage and scrape your id raw. I watched it with Chinese subtitles bc the English translations bothered me, which meant I had to look at the screen, which meant I had to video call meretricula instead of just texting her as we watched, which ran us into a thicket of problems with spotty internet etc. It was worth it. It took a dozen episodes to definitively hook me—everyone tells you the first 2 eps make zero sense and it’s 100% true. I had read maybe half the novel it’s based on prior to giving up, and forgotten most of the plot points, but on review it does seem the novel has both a different structure (the flashbacks aren’t all clumped into one long 30-episode flashback) and a different tone: It feels like WWX’s actions are more morally ambiguous in the book, and homophobia is a thing (in the show it’s not a thing at all), and JGY has more depth (i didn’t get to see most of JGY’s book-machinations because I dnf’d the novel about halfway through). I heartily wish that I could have been more fannish about this show, but it just didn’t hit the “fannish engagement” spot for me. Even though I cared a lot about (some) (JGY rights!!!) aspects of canon, and meretricula has got thousands of recs at her fingertips, and the quality of the writing in this fandom, i s2g you could read a cql fic every day for the rest of your life and never have to read a bad one. I find myself plotting to abduct some of these writers and make them write for my other fandoms.

La Casa de Papel (2017), all four currently extant seasons. This is hands-down my favorite new canon that I consumed in 2020. I even rewatched a few episodes, which I rarely do with TV shows. It’s an ensemble piece and it’s about a heist at the Spanish Royal Mint (well, S1-2 are; in S3-4 they hit up the Bank of Spain because go big or go home right?). In English the show is translated as Money Heist which kind of misses the point because the Mint that they’re hijacking? It’s literally a house of paper. Money isn’t real. It represents real obligations between people, sure, but money itself is fake. It’s not that I, an atomized individual, go out and earn this bag of $ by the sweat of my brow and then the government comes along and taxes it from me; without the government there is no money. Without a functioning society to confer value on it, money is worthless—it’s just paper. Now do y’all see why I glommed onto this show so hard? It’s a wildly popular show, especially internationally—I see a lot of tumblr edits subtitled in Greek or Portuguese or Thai—and is it a good show? Probs not but it’s addictive af. There are a lot of subplots that go nowhere, that are designed to build tension but don’t advance the plot at all, and that’s a fair criticism. But even when the plot doesn’t move a single centimeter there’s character work being done. Whenever I see one-star reviews of this show that bemoan how “the plot is nonsensical, it’s not a heist it’s a soap opera” I have the urge to reply “bro why tf do you think I watch it?” I do have mixed feelings about how attached I got to Actual Rapist Berlin—not because I don’t think rapists can’t make compelling main characters, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station featured one—but if you give the rapist’s victim(s) zero screentime to react or process the trauma, it sure does feels gross. The camera is also beyond male gaze-y, clearly there are only straight men in this writer’s room. So is it problematique? Yes. Am I rolling around in this dumpster methodically reading every fic in the Berlermo tag? Also yes. Yes yes I know S1-2 were a perfectly contained heist story and there was no need to go and shoot three more (less tightly written, much messier) seasons but by god am I grateful they did. These latter seasons gave us Palermo, and SOY EL SUDACA QUE VINO A REPATRIAR EL ORO QUE USTEDES SAQUEARON, HIJO DE PUTA is still my fave line from this entire show (me, frantically texting witcherology: “What’s a sudaca???”). S1-2 were proof of concept for the idea that you cannot plan a perfect heist: you can account for every contingency save the messiness of the human heart. S3-4 are straight up anti-capitalist propaganda and I’m so here for it. I do think Alicia is thematically the most interesting new character, because my headcanon is that Raquel joins the resistance for love of Sergio, and Alicia joins la resistencia out of cold calculation (because she personally has gotten screwed over by The System). I don’t mean to say that Raquel doesn’t believe in the cause; just that it was her love for Sergio that opened up the space to reevaluate “who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.” The other day I casually asked my husband if he was familiar with “Bella Ciao” and he sang the whole damn song for me and he never remembers the lyrics to anything so I guess we can assume they are teaching all the kiddos to be revolutionaries over in Italy. :D

hp | The Age of Lies by TheDivineComedian (24k Marauders + Regulus Black) This fic asks the criminally underrated question “why does Sirius always get to be the smartass of this friendgroup” and proceeds to give Remus zingers for dayssssss. It’s great. It’s an extremely angsty fic, 90% pain-to-humor ratio but the humor is dead on and the character work—especially the Peter POV—I have seldom seen anything to equal it. The millisecond I finished leaving kudos I downloaded a copy because who knows when one’s favorite fics will get taken down by the author. Like, I’m not saying I’m on this “Sirius thinks Remus is a Death Eater” pain train for the wand jokes (that’s what all the Polyjuice-precaution security questions amount to: dick jokes) … but I’m not not saying that either.

hp | sleeper (177k gen) Harry visits an alternate dimension where he is BFFs with Sirius’s son and Draco’s younger sister. Grindelwald is Chancellor, nobody’s ever heard of Dumbledore, and Tom Riddle is the new DADA professor. This story took a sec to get going but it’s reliably funny even before it went anywhere (Regulus is alive, and his terrible twins are named Castor and Pollux) and it does indeed go to some interesting places.

hp | House Proud by astolat (23k Drarry) well i didn’t glean any new insights re: Harry or Draco but I sure learned a lot about astolat. fantastic, of course—top-notch work.

hp | A Keen Observer by DeepDownSlytherin (150k Andromeda/Ted) Andy Black at Hogwarts, Years 1 through 7. I gotta say, Ted Tonks is a wonderful supporting character but the story is really about the three Black sisters, and how they grew apart. Sirius is a really useful foil here since he got himself disowned first, and while Andy ends up in the same place she doesn’t arrive there the same way; she doesn’t flare hot the way Sirius and Bellatrix do.

black sails | you and i survived by youremyqueen (23k Charles/Jack/Anne pre-canon) This right here is everything I love about Black Sails, a show steeped in violence and rough sex—two things I don’t particularly care for—that somehow manages to depict a plethora of healthy, positive, emotionally fulfilling relationships? And that doesn’t equate “relationship” with “romantic liaison”? This fic is so many things. It’s first of all an epic takedown of toxic hyper-masculinity. It’s Jack-pov, and Jack is my forever favorite. But it really prods hard at the bundle of walking contradictions that is Charles, and Jack, and Anne too. Jack to Charles: “If you want me to be stiff and silent, you’ll have to marry me first.” “If unencumbered understanding and acceptance is Jack’s conception of love, then this is Vane’s: a drowning love.” Charles: “But you’re not easy to conquer, that’s the trick. You just pretend.”

mcu | cascades. by orange-crushed (100k Stucky) Steve is teleporting erratically and involuntarily—literally falling apart into atoms—until the Winter Soldier shows up. Bucky is the thread that draws Steve home, always. It’s monumentally good. Featuring: No Avengers but plenty of Howling Commandos. “Steve would recognize that expression through a five-dollar telescope, looking down at earth from the moon.” “He spent so many years dreaming about it that he was afraid to meet it awake.” “I will kill anyone who comes for him. With my own two hands. I swear before God. Tell your friends.” “I pick every damn fight, but you pick ones that matter.”

asoiaf | two halves of a soul by angel-deux (40k Braime soulmark + highschool au) The one where Theon lives in the Starks’ basement. This is the Platonic ideal of a high school AU. It made me smile and snicker in equal measure and it’s just sincere enough without delving too deep into the endless dramallama of high school.

trc | King by the Roadside by nimmieamee (165k Gansey/Adam/Blue/Ronan/Noah OT5) I am deceased, this fic has slain me. It’s a canon-divergence AU where Gansey never died of a bee sting on the ley line, never had any sense knocked into him, attends Aglionby as captain of the crew team, lives his whole life astride the world, has never spoken more than five words to Adam or Ronan. Then it all comes crashing down. In his darkest hour—when Gansey is living in his car yes it’s his beloved Camaro—he is befriended by Adam and Noah. Blue comes later. Ronan doesn’t really figure until the midway point. This fic is SO GOOD. I do not have adequate words to tell you guys how good. This is the ot5 we deserve, and Maggie was a coward for not giving it to us. I do think the fic is strongest on the Gansey-Adam leg of the ot5 (it apparently started out as A Little Princess AU so like, no surprise there). Adam is so underrated and underappreciated—by canon and by fandom both—and I am jubilant to see him get his due here. I also think Gansey is a significantly better person in this fic than he is in canon??? These are Gansey quotes: “You don’t know me at all if you think I would rather chase Glendower than keep all of you safe.” “I have my money back. Fine. But I don’t want to be the person I was before I met you. I don’t want to be without you. Without all of you I would be nothing but a guy with too many things.” I really cannot endorse this fic enough, it’s got Maggie’s narrative voice down pat—it’s even got minor characters like Kavinsky and Piper’s voices—and the humor is on point (Noah: “Like twenty-five percent of my Aglionby friendships killed me”). The plot sort of meanders around for 150k+ words but since when did Maggie care about plot.

Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth (2020) (Locked Tomb #2) If Gideon the Ninth made me love Taz Muir, Harrow the Ninth made me awestruck at her writing chops. This book is a tour de force and also, as cafemassolit  pointed out, the very last thing you’d expect after the unserious goth snark of Gideon the Ninth. Impossible to discuss without MAD SPOILERS so: A meditation on grief. Not just Harrow’s grief, but every Lyctor’s grief for every dead cavalier. Everything about Lyctorhood comes back to the necromancer-cavalier bond, which is a setup so fertile for AU fusions I pray to god we see them the way we see, say, Pacific Rim fusions or daemon AUs. It’s so on-brand that Harrow performed experimental brain surgery on herself not because she loved or missed Gideon (which she did) but because nobody tells Harrowhark Nonagesimus what to do, and she flat-out refuses to be beholden to anyone. Since Abigail and Magnus are a functional version of Harrow and Gideon, it makes sense that Abigail is a much bigger presence in this book, the way Magnus loomed bigger in book 1. Of course Palamedes and Camilla are a functional version of Issac and Jeannemary, and it was lovely to be reunited with them (the coffeeshop AU!! the hug—when Palamedes went to hug amnesiac!Harrow I screamed out loud). My private conviction is that the next book, Alecto the Ninth, will be the romance novel that Palamedes has been scribbling on wallpaper. I mean, at the rate Muir is going would anyone be surprised?

Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth (2019) (Locked Tomb #1) (reread) It’s rare that a reread is better than the first read-through but now that I’m not struggling to identify secondary characters and I know what’s coming this book is twice as rewarding. I love Gideon sfm she’s so decent.

Cat Sebastian, Two Rogues Make a Right (2019) (#2) mlm childhood BFFs to lovers!!!! Cat Sebastian, a woman after my own heart.

Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood (2019) “Fay, an you ever loved me…” What an arrow of a novella. Unerringly drove its iron broadhead tip directly into my heart. People talk about how the forest-ness or the fae-bargain-ness was well done, or how gruff Tobias is such an endearing POV, or Henry’s mom is #lifegoals, and it’s all true but that line is the beating heart of this story for me.

Stephen King, “The Road Virus Heads North” (1999) Why I thought it would be a good idea to read a horror story about a cursed painting that’s impossible to destroy (much like the One Ring), that follows its victim from Boston to Maine, while I was driving up to Maine for the weekend, I have no effing clue.

France Hardinge, Deeplight (2020) “We are all squeezed into new shapes by the people around us.” “You like saving terrible people, don’t you?” “That was the problem with working out what made people tick; sometimes you were left understanding them and not wanting them to die.” This is the first male protagonist of Hardinge’s I’ve read, and as I said to hamsterwoman in the sync-read thread, she tends to pit these wily adolescent protagonists against systems that are corrupt or broken in some way, and the protag has more resources than they think they do, and the engine that drives the plot is the mystery of how the system is failing people. Deeplight fits right into that mold. My overall takeaway was I identified hella strongly with our eel of a hero, Hark, and much less strongly with the supporting cast than I have in previous Hardinge books: “Eels always have spines. They just bend a lot.”

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (2020) Frivolous party-girl leaves Mexico City, treks out to isolated country estate to check on her newlywed cousin, whose letters have grown sinister. There is a house and it is goddamn creepy, and once you set foot in it good luck ever getting out. The mystery of the house grabs you from the get-go, and it’s a compelling enough mystery that it made me overlook some of my problems with Moreno-Garcia’s prose (I mostly just felt like the dialogue was in a weird register). There is body horror. So much body horror. This whole house is a cancer. What I like about Noemí as a protagonist is that the very qualities that she’s constantly being dissed for—her frivolity, her lack of tact, her pigheaded stubbornness, her chainsmoking—are what enable her to escape. And she doesn’t just escape, she rescues others as well. I don’t think I was able to breathe until I read the final line.

Neal Shusterman, Scythe (2016) (Arc of a Scythe #1) Well I can’t fault this YA dystopia (utopia?) for clarity—the writing’s astoundingly clear. What it lacks is depth. Two centuries after science has defeated mortality, there is a special class of people, scythes, whose job is to cull humanity of its excess population. God the worldbuilding is so shallow. The story follows two apprentice scythes whose romance is so clumsy; this is definitely a situation where a friendship would have been more emotionally impactful than a romance. The pacing was almost cinematic in its clarity—i could without much trouble plot the ups and downs on an XY axis. I kept waiting to get bored and stop reading and I never did, I just kept turning pages and now I’m halfway through the second book in the series sooooo joke’s on me lol. I could go on about how clumsy and amateur aspects of the book were but here’s the truth: It’s greater than the sum of its parts. Is it a book that does a bunch of things with virtuoso impressivity? Nope. Does it do well the one thing it sets out to do? Absolutely.

Holly Black, Red Glove (2011) (Curseworkers #2) Local squib boy Cassel Sharpe comes into his magical powers and finds himself wedged between a rock (the FBI) and a hard place (the mafia his girlfriend is in line to inherit). This was a super fun read but I don’t think the romance was well integrated into the plot (who killed Cassel’s brother Phillip?) or the theme (at one point Cassel and his muggle friends attend a nonviolent protest for curseworker rights and get arrested lol). Cassel’s entire family, minus his grandpa, continues to be toxic af—I just wanna give this kid a hug. Overall I thought Book 1 was stellar and this was just plain old good.

Jane Barry, A Time in the Sun (1962) I thought it was going to be about a white girl kidnapped by Apaches who goes native. Given the publication date I was prepared for hella racism. The good news is this book is a lot less racist than I expected! The bad news is the main POV character is a veteran of—and remains heavily invested in—the Lost Cause of the Confederacy which is, uh, not examined at all. Why in blazes did you pick up this book, Lya, I can hear you all asking. Well I was browsing a used bookstore and it had a pretty cover. Jane Barry is not a writer I’ve ever heard of, but she is an incredibly assured writer who never puts a foot wrong in her evocation of time and place (mid-19th century Arizona territory). My beef with her is she seems to be interested in the homosocial relationships between men to the exclusion of other kinds of relationships??? Look here lady if I wanted to go on a historical jaunt with a bunch of bros I’d just reread Lord of the Rings. The kidnapped girl who kicks off the whole plot is almost an afterthought. There is an elegiac quality to the narrative that strikes me as quintessentially Western: It’s about a vanishing frontier and a disappearing way of life. Which makes me mad because indigenous people still, you know, exist in this day and age. Otoh the book makes no bones about the reason the frontier is vanishing—it’s because white men stole a bunch of Indians’ land and massacred them. No, #notallwhitemen but the Apache aren’t gonna trust any white men after this. The end of this book features an actual live onscreen massacre accompanied by Major Character Death, so you know, pretty heavy stuff. Masterfully written but fucking brutal book.