maharetr

I'm hoping I'm writing this before you see your assignment email, or that you've come back! See my dear creator tag for more details, especially about Bastard Son (etc), but here we go!

General DNWs I have a weirdly intense embarrassment-adjacent squick that basically goes: if you could describe a character as crestfallen, I'm going to struggle to read it. That goes double if it's not 200% fixed for the character in question before the end of the piece. I am here for angsty, definitely, and I love me some hurt/comfort. But I'd rather no graphic violence, rape, or major character death etc.

Disco Elysium. Oh god, I love so much of this game (the fatphobia a jarring, saddening exception). But I love Kim so much, and realising-he's-maybe-not-100%-straight, trying-to-sober-up Harry.

Idea sparks:
- sheltering somewhere together out of the weather in Martinase
- reserved, compartmentalising Kim letting Harry see all of him (his home, or sharing what lights him up, and/or his body).
- Harry figuring out how to have a life post-addiction and who he might want to be. Or figuring what/who he wants to be sober for, if he's not anywhere near post-addiction yet.
- Both or one of them figuring out how to be really, actually happy. I'm happy for a solo character study here, if you want.

Bastard son... uh, see here for possibly too many of my thoughts?

4'33" - John Cage (Song) I saw this on the fandom list and cackled with joy. So the point of this piece is that whatever you can hear over the next 4 and a half minutes *is* the music. Loosely. Wiki entry here.
Idea sparks:
- So someone's (your fandom fave? an OC?) sitting quietly. Where are they/what're they doing/why. What are they hearing and what are they making it mean?
- A person in an orchestra and/or the conductor making those four ish minutes really mean something to themselves (or the partner they're silently communicating with) I love me some non-verbal communication, in-jokes, and...I'm struggling to find the word for it at speed, but that language that develops between two people that makes sense to them alone.

Good luck! Feel free to use or discard any idea here, basically, and have fun!

Finished reading
The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by S.A. Chakraborty. This was FUN. I loved the take on demons, and really liked Amina and her crew. The latter parts of the supernatural elements felt as interesting and as consequential as a dream sequence (which is to say, not very), but the author made the 'recounting story to a scribe" WORK, in beautiful, effective hindsight, and she gets many kudos for that. I'll gladly pick up book 2, doubly so if there's a 'the story so far' refresher at the front.

Big magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. Filled with woo and vibes about being creative, but they're *impeccably* my woo and vibes. Read a library copy, and then turned around and went out and bought my own copy.

Nimona by ND Stevenson. I saw the movie first (which I LOVED), and it's hard to tell if I'm unfairly judging the original text by the one that came second, or if it's actually wobbly as a book. It *really* feels to me like a 'started, gonna see where this goes, hey!' web comic. Which it was! And isn't automatically a bad thing (see: Digger by Ursula Vernon, which I think was also this but didn't feel like it), but it kinda... I feel like the movie was better, because as a text it *had* to make coherent sense from the get go, whereas a pantsed web comic doesn't.

The moon of crusted snow by Waubgeshig Rice. Been on my TBR pile forever, finally got it from the library. This was...sadly inconsistent for me. Someone in reviews suggested it should be read more as a fable than as a post-apoca story, and that shift in thinking did help, post-read. A First Nations (North American) community is cut off from the rest of the world by a power outage that also affects the rest of probably the country. I'm still very torn on it in multiple directions. ( general thoughts, positive and negative. No real spoilers ) I'd be really interested in others' thoughts, if you've read it.

The reluctant hallelujah by Gabrielle Williams. This was an impulse secondhand bookshop buy. Australian YA. I was taken in by the title and the cover, and by the strong, assured teenage Aussie voice that was effortlessly rolling along the page. Teen girl goes on road trip to convey Secret of her parents, who have gone missing.

I finished it in three hours of holiday afternoon, and I would absolutely actively seek out more by this author and...did not like this particular book, thinking back on it. It started with a solid premise: parents haven't come home, they have a Secret that their teen has to deal with, and transport. Excellent premise. Except ( spoilers ) The MacGuffin could have been anything and the author went with...that, and also didn't touch it, but also it was such a good Australian teen voice and I am so *clutches hair and growls in frustration*.

Currently reading:
Diving back into Witch king by Martha Wells, which I'd gotten 70-odd pages into during Hugo reading and realised I wanted to savour rather than rush through for a deadline. Picking it back up has been remarkably difficult on the executive function, but I'm back in at page 40 or so, and finding the swing again.

A question of age: women, ageing and the forever self by Jacinta Parsons. Recced by my mum who did it as an audiobook. I have a library paperback, and it's...hmm. Is there a word for purple prose that's a totally different colour but also same vibe? idek. I want to support the idea very, very much and I'll definitely give it 50 pages (possibly 100 pages given the ease of the page layout) but I'm cautious.

Up next:
It's taken me this long to get back into the reading swing, I don't really want to jinx things, but maybe The artist's way by Julia Cameron.

Listed in the order I read them:

"The Sound of Children Screaming" by Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare Magazine, October 2023) ( Read more... )

"Better Living Through Algorithms" by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld May 2023) ( Read more... )

"How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub" by P. Djèlí Clark (Uncanny Magazine, January-February 2023) ( Read more... )

"The Mausoleum’s Children" by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny Magazine, May-June 2023) ( Read more... )

美食三品 (“Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times”), 宝树 / Baoshu (银河边缘013：黑域密室 / Galaxy’s Edge Vol. 13: Secret Room in the Black Domain) ( Read more... )

"Answerless Journey", Han Song / 没有答案的航程, 韩松, translated by Alex Woodend (Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers).( Read more... )

Reading amnesty!

Put aside
In ascension by Martin MacInnes
Described as Contact for the climate change era. I started it, and was very engaged and enjoying the quiet narration of the protagonist and the intensity of what was going down and what it was building towards. And then I put it down at a crucial point, and didn’t get back to it fast enough for those crucial details to stay in my brain, so it stayed put down, which is in no way the fault of the book. It would be nice to get back to it once I’m not furiously Hugo-finalist reading.

Finished reading
The tainted cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was an impulse library reserve that past-me had made, and by the time it came in present-me had no memory of why, which felt like a gift on several levels. It turned out to be fantastic. It felt like a sumptuous read: rich details, grounded world, and deep inside characters’ motivations and quirks. A fantasy-frame for a murder mystery detective novel, essentially. With a dyslexic-and-hiding-it male Watson and a female, also-neurodivergent Holmes, this was a good read, and will be going on my nomination ballot for next year’s Hugos, if I do shell out for voting rights this year.

Some desperate glory by Emily Tesh. I’d really wanted to love Tesh’s novellas but hadn’t, so I was delighted with how good this was, for all that the subject matter was grim. Kyr is part of the last outpost of humanity fighting against the aliens who destroyed Earth. Where this book took that, how fast it got there, and how it handled its characters’ fascism was both deep inside Kyr’s head and horrifying to the reader, with some very fun-to-me tropes to get Kyr to see it too. Happy to spoil in comments. The ending was slightly, slightly pat, but also made me smile on the last page, so 4.5 stars, and definitely going on my probable Hugo ballot.

Currently reading
Witch king by Martha Wells. Everyone loves Murderbot in a way that makes me want to give it another try, but this’ll do in the meantime. The quotes on the back give me no actual hints about what it’s about, and the lists of characters and their very, very similar names and titles are appreciated and exhausting, but the first few pages I got read on the bus are…yeah, yeah, okay, I’m here for it.

Up next
Translation state by Ann Leckie. I read Ancillary Justice, but it never quite sunk in for me like I’d hoped. Interested in reading this one as a nudged-by-the-Hugos.

Finished reading:
Sisters of the vast black by Lina Rather. Finished at last! I’d been spoiled for [thing], but that didn’t lessen my grim enjoyment of the plot when it finally arrived. I also didn’t see [other reveal] coming. I feel like I should have but I didn’t, and frankly kudos for that, author. I’d be tempted to keep reading the series, but all the reviews are talking about how the grim gets grimmer, which is very in line of where it was going, but also not somewhere I want to go myself right now.

How to keep house while you’re drowning by K.C. Davis. After having two people use the word lazy in genuine judgement (not at me!) in my presence within a few days of each other, I finally went looking for a sample of ‘Laziness does not exist’ which has been on my TBR for ages. It wasn’t quite what I was after, but the ‘readers also liked’ gave me the above, which was much more what I was after. This is about separating care tasks like housework, eating, and body cleaning from the framework of morality that so many, many people have them embedded in. The book’s designed for people who have ADHD/depression/grief, and who are generally struggling. I’m struggling way less than that general audience, and it’s a very short, very quick read. I still feel like this book lightly rocked my world’s foundations, and improved it in subtle but profound ways.

( Choice quotes )

There’s also several incredibly important chapters on rest: the right to rest, the necessity of rest, and the fact that housework task balance in a relationship/household isn’t about who does the tasks, but the importance of everyone getting the amount of rest they need.

Highly recced. As someone on goodreads reviewed: ‘Short, sweet, and validating as fuck.”

Raven, graphic novel by Kami Garcia, illustrated by Gabriel Picolo. I read this because Beast boy kept bumping onto my radar as a Cool Thing, but it was second in a series, Raven is first, and I’m a completionist to my bones. There’s a really fantastic story here that either would have been better served as a traditional prose novel, or as a substantially expanded graphic novel. We get introduced to Raven as she’s involved in a car accident that kills her foster mother. She gets family-fostered into her aunt’s care, and that and her amnesia left me utterly floundering. The references to her mom left me floundering: her foster mom or her birth mom? I had no grounding in who she was before the accident, and only a vague sense of her personality by the end of the novel. There was so much going on with family history, powers, and baddies that as someone who was coming to it utterly cold, I only had the barest of grips on by the end of the book. Left me wanting a much deeper story.

Beast boy by Kami Garcia, illustrated by Gabriel Picolo. I’d been attracted by the opening pages (funny, charming, really good sense of interiority), and by someone’s tumblr screencap of a found family drawn from a neat camera angle. This was much, much better grounded, helped by Gar’s family, friends, and a full set of memories. Also it’s a much more traditional superhero comes into their own narrative, which helps, but it took nearly a month of not-really reading Raven vs three days of reading Beast boy, which feels like a shame.

Currently reading:
How to do the work by Nicole LePera. Got interested in her work via her Twitter account. This is a mix of working through trauma, soothing the body, developing better relationships with yourself and others type stuff. So far it’s a mix of ‘I knew 80% of that, but the rest of the 20% is new and hella useful’, and ‘oooof’ E.g. I know a fair amount about staying present and grounded so that wasn’t too challenging, but goddamn am I bracing myself for some ego work.

At 52% this a cautious rec so far: plenty of good stuff in here, but there’s also a really hefty thread of ‘yoga solved all my client’s problems!’ and also sincere plugging of intermittent fasting to ‘give your digestive system a break’, which… *makes very sour face*. So, rec, with caveats.

Didn’t finish:
Wolfsong by T. J. Klune. I nudged myself into reading the last chapter to see if I wanted to read the intervening 100-odd pages, and the answer was actually, no. Sadly, but no.

Up next:
- The ladies of Grace Adieu. having another go at it as bedtime/book-book reading.
- One of the many, many epubs I got from the Hugo voter’s packet. Probably the short stories and working up to the longer.

Finished reading
Accidentally Kelly Street by Briony Stewart. An illustrated picture book of the lyrics to said song by Frente. Illustrated (and therefore essentially, composed as a new story) by someone I went to uni with. I have weirdly strong memories of the video clip and the song, and the illustrator has turned the lyrics into this gorgeously lit, utterly coherent, completely different narrative of a story. Do rec.

The spear cuts through water by Simon Jimenez. A library ebook, the first in a long while. Picked up based on Abigail Nussembaum's review here This is doing fascinating things with point of view (first, second, and third), and is also at points, grippingly terrifying. Several characters are introduced as bracing themselves to challenge the evil throne, essentially, and I was nauseated for all of them (it's pretty damn violent in places). It's 550ish dense pages, which took a good six weeks to finish, and I was very grateful to whoever it was who reserved the ebook after me and then immediately decided 'nah' and returned it, so I an essentially unbroken string of renew, and renew, and--. I feel like the final third could have perhaps been foregrounded a little better, but it's still a really, really strong novel. De rec.

Small game by Blair Braverman VERY interested based on this review. Turns out I fucking inhaled this one -- 300ish phone ebook pages in three days, done and dusted. Harrowing and realistic, this is a very sparse, clipped writing style which teetered on that knife-edge of 'not good', and *yet*... I could not stop reading, and also started thinking in that voice, and kinda want it read it again in a 'I'm not ready to leave yet' sort of way. I think on balance that makes it very, very good.

Currently reading:
The gifts of imperfection by Brene Brown. I bought this paperback years ago after watching her vulnerability TedTalk, and bounced off it at the time. In retrospect, I can see why: this is both challenging as fuck, and also a speed run of a bunch of in-depth concepts. It reads like a workbook of a much larger course. Which isn't a bad thing, honestly -- it's a quick read (having said that, I'm yet to finish it, having put it aside after I went back to work), but I'm very glad I went into it with both her TedTalk several times over, and several years of therapy under my belt so I already had the shape of what she was talking about.

It was also challenging enough that in the few weeks since putting it down and writing this up, I had entirely forgotten the chapter titles. It feels like one of those therapy sessions where we were going somewhere deep and frankly threatening or core enough that I lightly...forgot. Hard. I do know I've left some page markers in a 'come back and engage again later' and I think I remember what those were?

The sisters of the vast black by Lina Rather. An ebook novella I bought ages back for the promise of queer nuns in space. I don't actually know *what* I was expecting from those tags, exactly. This is well written and slightly less gripping than I'd hoped (but that's also hampered by my sporadic reading style). Many feelings-points for the description of the woman reading her love's letter, and savouring the warmth of the tablet she's reading it on like an embrace. I'm restarting because I didn't get that far into it the first time, and it's been long enough since I picked it up that I can't remember the first 20 pages, actually.

The dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. About 25 pages in, physical paperback. This has been on my 'should read' list for years. I remember bouncing off 'The left hand of darkness' in my mid 20s becuase I in no way understood what I was reading or what was going on. This one, I've either grown up a bit, or it's less dense-of-concept. Either way, I'm relieved, and it's making me chuckle, even.

Up next:
The ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke. Absolutely captivated by File770's spruiking of the opening pages.
Even Though I Knew the End, C.L. Polk - Nebula novella that I saw a very good review of that I now can't find.
“If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You”, John Chu -- Ditto novelette, including on the review front.

I fell so hard for this show, and I'm excited for basically any fic for it. Go nuts! <3 But if you're after specific pointers, see below:

Things I love about this fandom: cool powers! generational rituals! magic and spells and alchemy! And thing that is not stated in the text but infuses every word: abuse, and if we'd been able to get a season 2 (fuck you Netflix), starting to process that abuse and trying to work towards recovery or some form of peace: Annalise after the finale, holy shit, or in the case of the guys, what they want their lives to be now they're not being actively abused or controlled. Um, this fandom pinged many of my dark recovery buttons, basically.

A respite from the dark is equally welcome! A cosy time together on the boat (minus traumatic twin deaths!), a few more fic-days with the Blood witches in France and that bed. Or that quiet night in, in a squat or an apartment somewhere: bad movies, takeaway, and safety, god they deserve that.

If you wanted to follow me down that darker rabbit hole...that moment where someone looks at their abuser and realises that person doesn't have the same control over them anymore -- that the victim is now a survivor, and both of them know it. Triple points for friends/lovers supporting and backing the survivor up. The three of them being fucked UP in their own ways, and finding comfort in each other and a little bubble of okay, if they can let their guards down enough to receive it.

With Gabriel & Mercury in particular with the above point: Fuck, all that memory fuckery, and Gabriel knowing he can't trust his own fucking memory, and trying to find a way to be okay. Making memories that he wants to hold on to with Nathan and Annalise, and not wanting Mercury in them, ugh. Wanting to rescue her latest victim. There's a wallop of psychological and emotional abuse going on, and I feel like the show was also strongly hinting at sexual abuse there that was potentially continuing into adulthood, but no need to go there (unless you want to. I'm here for it if you are).

Within the context of the threesome: Nathan and also never having known a life that wasn’t being brutally controlled and monitored. And his relationship with Ceelia (who I adore embarrassingly a lot), who controlled and abused Nathan for all of his known life (she probably didn't do it *willingly* but still, that doesn't make it any less traumatic for him, obv). What's it like for them as equals--or probably Nathan as now *stronger* than she is, assuming [finale assumption redacted]?

For Annalise, holy fuck girl, that finale was A LOT. She who'd been doing comparatively trauma-free growing up and then WELP. Are the others there to catch her? How do they do it?

Best of luck! <3

(AKA I've gradually started reading again, and even more slowly am getting my shit together to make notes about it again. Actually, the push has been that I want to get some of my thoughts out about Stay and fight before I finish it. Also I wanted to be pissed about Orson Scott Card in multiple venues. Motivation is motivation, whatever its form, I guess?)

DNF
Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card. I know we all hate the bigot, but I was weak; it was a library copy, and I was craving a phat fantasy/sci-fi to fall into and this had so many things that I love: generation ships! Post-apoca! TIME TRAVEL!

But in the first 15 pages the MC's dad is killed (fine), and the death scene is one of the most strangely non-described, distantly written things I've read. Father (who is an established pompous ass) is trapped under a fallen tree, apparently impaled by branches, and asks his son not to look…but we have no idea what his son looks at instead, and father keeps talking in exactly the same lengthy uninterrupted sentences with no sign of pain. Also the son is a trapper of animals, and would know exactly what punctured intestines would smell like. There were So Many missed opportunities to ground the scene that I'm like "do you even care what you're writing?". I put the book down in cranky and googled "is the dad actually dead?" because there's no freaking body. (Spoiler: he's intended to be dead). I'm so sad that I won't get to the neat time travel and generation ships, but wow is it not worth the grinding frustration of "this could have been good, dammit."

Finished reading!
The witness for the dead by Katherine Addison. Reading the goblin emperor world such a weird experience for me. I can mostly catch up with how the world and its structures work, but people's names and titles are so unfamiliar to me that they don't stick. I'm not reading for the plot, I'm just such a profound sucker for 'emotional intimacy within formal structures' (“We thank you for that which the Serenity does not do” lives rent-free in my brain, forever), that I'm willing to read an entire novel with the literary equivalent of intense faceblindness, just for those moments. I'm buying the sequel, grim topic and everything.

Currently reading:
Stay and fight by Madeline Ffitch. This was…entirely as pitched by this Tiktok: https://www.carsales.com.au/cars/holden/cruze/suv-bodystyle/, but that doesn’t make it a comfortable read. It's a realistically grim look at what off-the-grid subsistence living is like, but also none of the main characters seem to like each other, which, again, grimly realistic, but it makes for an uncomfortable read. I actually paused reading for a long time when the external conflict looked like it was about to turn up, because I didn't want to see things get even *worse*.

I picked it back up, eventually, and when the external forces arrived, it was both a surprise to me that the author went there and also entirely real-world realistic and an important point to make, that I was genuinely impressed.

I've got less than 100 pages to go, and I'm legit transfixed. The last hundred pages also includes a C-plot relationship section that has me "THAT, I wanna learn how to write that love" (two similar-aged, non-related men, father and middle-aged-son dynamic, ‘son’ desperately loving the grouchy older man and wanting to make things good for him, and neither of them able to articulate a fucking word, and that’s fine). She’s also doing amazingly, in retrospect, in constructing brutally human, warts-and-all relationships. I very want to know how she's going to finish this novel, given she's pulled zero punches so far, and I can't see how this is going to end well, but but I want it to. Goodreads reviews suggests she doesn't pull off whatever she's aiming for, but the writing is so good on a sentence level, still.


Up next:
Take two of the giant fantasy, due in a few weeks:
Babel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57945316-babel-or-the-necessity-of-violence -- gonna try the excerpt of this, at least.

The grief of stones by Katherine Addison. Sequel to Witness. Bundled up in my order with the two below books, waiting for all three to arrive.

Psalm to the wild-built by Becky Chambers. I have a bounce-around relationship with Chambers’ works, but this one hit alllll of my comfort buttons in a row. (a re-read, I’m purchasing my own expensive copy after doing a library loan read) Entirely character-driven utopia. Nothing happens for an entire novella and I love it so, so much. $50 for a hardback novella much.

A prayer for the crown-shy, the sequel to the above.

Ten steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby. Nanette the show destroyed me in the best way. I’m equal keen/scared to read this probably as an ebook, and as I’m waiting for the other three above to arrive as a job lot, this will probably be first off the rank.

Oh, oh, and poetry books, incoming from Dymocks sometime maybe even this week. Ada Limon’s Dead bright things and The carrying: poems.

…I’ve been on a bit of a book-buying bender, I guess. Just a very slow, none-of-them-are-published yet bender.

God, I burned out on Hugo reading real hard/early this year, it seems. Or maybe it was right on time, and it's the later con start date that's fritzing things.

Finished reading:
Girls of paper and fire by Natasha Ngan. I inhaled this in a week. The tension really does ratchet up excellently. The romance honestly made about as much sense as the average 'girl falls for mysterious boy', which I can't complain about. I did like Wren as a character. I can't tell if the book is actually disserved by being YA, or if I was just interested in something it was never going to cover, regardless (exploring what intimacy was like after assault).

The galaxy and the ground within by Becky Chambers. My reading of this is so all over the place. It took 100 pages for the story to move out of territory covered the in the blurb, and after it did, I felt like I was sorely lacking for reasons to keep reading. There was a deeply touching moment or two (Tupo and their museum was a particular highlight), but then there were long stretches of not much. Then the denouement hits for each character, and they are (for the most part) breathtakingly perfect, so clearly something worked in the preceding pages, but I'm at a loss to what it was. I want Roveg's story in its entirety, though. And actually, Speaker and Tracker's story, and their people. Thinking back, this felt like a novel-length short story, which is…awkward. Okay! But I wanted to read about these characters in different places than Chambers's wanted to put them.

Avoiding the aging parent trap by Brian Herd. An impulse reserve from the library, by an Australian family lawyer. I'm 60 quick pages in an don't feel like I've learned much, but it's also still in the ground-setting territory, and I'm an only child of an only child, so a lot of the 'bury your sibling hatchet for the sake of your parents' doesn't apply here. It sounds like solid-enough advice for them, though.
Now Finished: Heh. This was somewhat useful. The information about who owns what, and who will get what in which circumstances, was valuable. Also the "get legal advice before you do anything big or even medium-sized in relation to elder care or changing wills or selling anything" advice was very effectively driven home, esp in Australian-specific context. Centrelink doesn't care if you gift away your million dollar lotto win to charity; it still counts as your asset for five years. Ouch.

That said, Big Sky Publishing better be a cover for some guy working out of his study/garage, or I'm gonna be judging them super harshly. The copyediting (children's', ouch) and editing left a lot to be desired, and any half-decent editor should have pulled him up on exposing his biases, and get him to tone down his snideness.

Currently reading:
One last stop by Casey McQuiston. A library reserve, gleefully made while the book was still on order. I've read the first few pages, and it's tight and funny. I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep up with its style for hundreds and hundreds of pages, but I'm keen to have a go.

At p175 or so: This was a really good example of (…upping the ante? I'm not sure what term I'm looking for here). But when characters hit the point that I the reader knew about from the blurb, I had QUESTIONS, (with literally that much wide-eyedness interest), and kept reading. The wheels are starting to spin just a little bit, and the 'oh! I can never tell her how I feel about her!' is starting to grate, but I'm also reasonably sure the ante is about to up again, so I'm interestedly sticking it out.

Up next:
I now have a copy of Witness for the dead (Goblin Emperor companion book) by Katherine Addison. It's slimmer than I realized, and so, so pretty and nice to hold in hardback. I'm technically currently reading it, but it's much, much slower going, and requires much more brain power per page, so I'm just dipping in and out atm.

Finished reading:
Black sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. Having finished it, and having had a day or two to digest it, I like it more and more. It was well structured, and everything wove together well. I was slightly peeved that ( spoiler ), which somehow made it feel like not enough things were resolved to justify ending the novel when it did. An even more minor peeve was the use of xie/xer pronouns instead of they/them, which, after someone pointed out it makes gender neutral characters sound like literal aliens, I cannot unsee.

Her writing style—distanced and somewhat heavy on the telling—isn't my favourite, but it got the job done. The worldbuilding is evocative and interesting and new, and I ended up liking or at least being interested in a bunch of the characters. I'm interested enough in them and their new world order to consider picking up the sequel, which is an achievement in and of itself. It might even be new and fresh enough to bump Piranesi off the top of my ballot. Maybe.

Currently reading:
Cemetery boys by Aiden Thomas. mmm. This is published through Swoon Reads, a 'submit your manuscript for public voting! Most popular gets published!' outfit, which, oh boy. It feels like it, too, and that's not a compliment of its opening pages. I am extremely here for a Mexican ghost (a la Coco) romance story with a trans MC. Like, so very yes please. But I'm hoping very much that it smooths out.

Up next:
The city we became N. K. Jeminsin. I (re)read the first few pages (again) and FUCK, they're good. Hits the ground running with character and place and voice. So, so good.

General Hugo musings, for what they're worth
I liked Calculating Stars well enough, but reading Fated Stars somehow just feels like homework. Goodreads says I can jump straight to giving The Relentless Moon a go, which honestly is attractive.

Harrow the Ninth. I bounced so fucking hard off Gideon the Eighth, I can't even. I'm very here for orphan outcast, including orphan outcast raised entirely in a society that grinds her into the ground for being different. But one that somehow maintains a sense of defiant self, and a self of self so apparently outside the culture, really, really threw me. That said, skimming goodreads and opening the sample…I like this. I really fucking like this. FINE. I'll give Gideon another go.

Murderbot. I expected the first novella to grab me, and it just…didn't. I want to give the series another go, though. Goodreads says to read the second one, and then it's safe to jump to the novel, so I'm going to try that.