i've been doing A LOT of talking about media on podcasts in the last couple months, and i keep meaning to round them up and then forgetting. so here you go:

The Nerdette Book Club: Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki (a favorite book of the year, btw)
Adaptation Nation: Dune (the movie, which i had Big Feelings about)
Tar Valon or Bust (we've got recaps of the first three episodes of the Wheel of Time show up, plus we're finishing SHADOW RISING this week)

today's installment includes a rave review and also a mini-essay about a train and a water heater. here we go.
 

---

🗺 i absolutely blazed through THE CARTOGRAPHERS by Peng Shepherd, which comes out in March of 2022 and which i was convinced was out already, because what is time. it's amazing -- beautifully written, playing with reality in a fascinating way, perfect pacing (for me anyway; this is a thing i have been struggling with this past year. somehow i'm out of sync with most of the books i've been reading, which is a difficult thing to conquer), characters i both want to hug and shake occasionally, and it's even got an Easter egg for Le Guin fans, of which i am obviously one.

reader buzzwords: dark academia, fabulism/magical realism, secret society, locked-room murder, the NYPL library, family secrets, obsession with maps, stand-alone speculative fiction

i haven't read much from next year yet, but it's going to be hard to unseat this one as a fav for me. also if you haven't already read THE BOOK OF M by Shepherd, which came out a few years back and which i adored, and whose ending made me want to throw things in the best way, may i recommend that you get on that.

i also recently finished FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN by Tade Thompson, which IS out, and which is sneakily weird and horrifying in a way that's new to his works (or at least those that i've read) and is a really uncanny "murder in space + aliens + corporate greed + Afrofuturism" bomb of a sci-fi novel. i'll be talking about it more on the SFF Yeah podcast in the near future.

🚊 i missed a train that i was on-time for yesterday. here's what happened: after a Very Long Week, i went to West Philly to hang with a friend. we had a lovely time ranting about work and the world, drinking hot cocoa, and then going to my favorite Mexican place that is now too far from my house to get delivery. we finished up in plenty of time for me to catch the trolley to 30th Street Station for the next train home, which means someting in this case because the train line that i'm on only runs once an hour. that's it -- you get one shot every 60 minutes. i was on the platform 30 minutes before the train was supposed to leave. there was a train sitting there, but all the doors were closed (as far as i could tell). now, if you have lived on the G train line in Brooklyn, and ever had to take it from Court Square, you know how it goes: you wait for the doors to open, everyone rushes on and takes a seat, and then it leaves the station. that is not what happened here. i waited and waited, the time for the train came, and the (empty, as far as i could tell) train just pulled out and left. no announcement, no opening of all doors, no conductor call for passengers. lots of people on the platform also watched it leave. and then the board cleared and the next train, to Trenton, was announced, and when i asked someone else who was waiting there what train they were looking for, they said Trenton, and said, "that was your train."

i got a Lyft instead, and when i told the driver what had happened, he said "they say when that happens, you weren't meant to be on that train." i said, "maybe you're right" but i was thinking "actually what it means is i should have checked the whole train for an open door and/or found a conductor before it was too late."

then i got home and all i wanted was to crawl into an epsom salts bath, but when i ran the water, i couldn't get any hot water. we replaced our busted water heater with a tankless system earlier this year, which was very expensive and which everything we read and everyone we talked to assured us was worth it. but this has happened more than once,  only to me, and often only at night when i'm the only one home. for whatever reason, it just will not sustain hot water, no matter how long i run it. but then other times it's fine. so i had a bath full of cold water (because i kept trying and hoping) that i had to drain, i was tired and sore, and i cried -- like, full-on sobbed -- for probably 15 minutes. then i crawled into bed with an ibuprofen and a glass of wine and read THE CARTOGRAPHERS til i fell asleep. this morning, the hot water is working and i got a shower just fine.

i don't know what the lesson is here. there's probably no lesson, except for that i desperately want there to be one to make it feel worth the frustration and sobbing. maybe the lesson is, sometimes the train leaves without you and sometimes your water heater doesn't work for absolutely no reason. maybe the lesson is, something happens at night that makes a tankless hot water heater not work. maybe the lesson is we need to call someone to come look at the water heater. maybe the lesson is just that i'm really tired and everything feels bigger than it is.

⚖️ anyway my minor first-world frustrations feel extremely small when i think about the Rittenhouse verdict and how broken our world is, has been, continues to be. i'm working on getting involved in hyper-local politics, because it feels concrete and achievable in a way that trying to affect the big picture does not.

👋 i hope wherever you are, whatever frustrations big and small you're dealing with, you've got a cozy place to hide and concrete, achievable actions to take when you're ready to emerge.