Welp, hell of a way to start. I accidentally read much more than I intended this month; my insomnia's been so terrible I mostly sleep between 0900 and 1430 these days, which isn't a great habit and is one I'm hoping getting my damned ankle finally fixed might help with. We shall see.

Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party - Jonathan Karl

“You’ll find, when you become very successful, the people that you will like best are the people that are less successful than you, because when you go to a table you can tell them all of these wonderful stories, and they’ll sit back and listen,” Trump explained. “Always be around unsuccessful people, because everybody will respect you. Do you understand that?”

This fucking guy.

I've read Karl's other two books about the former President, and they're all interesting. I have to be in the right place for them. Sometimes I can't stand to see mention of the man, and sometimes I am deeply here to read detailed and gossipy descriptions of the incredible things the man said and did and thinks and thought and the ways people let him just do them. It's buckwild.

Anyway the premise of the book is basically that the Republican party has chosen the form of its own destruction and that their death throes are gonna be dangerous for all of us. So that's fun. A fun energy to start off this year with.

Paladin's Faith - T. Kingfisher

“It’s like that riddle with the goose and the fox and the corn, and if you don’t stop now, you’re going to find that the goose has beaten the fox to death with the corn.”

God I love these fuckin' books. This one's very good, as they all are, and pretty hot, as they all are, and if it is also unfortunately less gay than the third, well, not everything can be perfect. But in truth I think there were things that happened in this one, oh man.

OK. A dear friend read this one before me and when, a few weeks ago, I was talking about how much I enjoyed them, said something about how she was excited for me to reach the ending of this one, specifically because of me and the me I am. And uh. She wasn't wrong.

Let's just say all my shit about faith and redemption, loss of faith and acceptance, about villains who can be redeemed and those who can't, about the choice to devote oneself to something because you aren't shaped to do anything else, even when that part of you is cracked and bleeding -- there's a reason I love this series. Also it's funny, and there are ~theories I have, and I have officially made my guesses elsewhere and if I am right I'm getting another tattoo as a reward (I think I'm right, gang).

Small Change - Jo Walton

This novel is for everyone who has ever studied any monstrosity of history, with the serene satisfaction of being horrified while knowing exactly what was going to happen, rather like studying a dragon anatomized upon a table, and then turning around to find the dragon's present-day relations standing close by, alive and ready to bite.

This trilogy always fucks me up. The first time I read Farthing, I didn't know it was alternate history, and I didn't know enough about post-WWII-era Britain to know what had changed, until about halfway through the book. I missed the little nudges and assumed, wrongly, I was just misremembering when that war ended, or something.

But more than that it's the slow, dripping erosion of what small bits of light that might happen. Every book ends with things worse than they began, really, and every book involves someone, at least one, choosing to slice off some fundamental part of the person they believed themselves to be to survive. Jo talks in the afterwards of one or more of them about trying to get modern-day people to understand that this specific history (and history in general) are closer than we think, are right next door, that this stuff isn't black-and-white vintage photographs but is in fact moving in next door to you.

And if that doesn't feel resonant to you, IDK what to tell you, man.

67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence - Howard Means

But what is in many ways most memorable about Robert Canterbury’s report are the final two items on his list: “Problem Areas and Lessons Learned” and “Recommendations.” Beside both, the highest-ranking National Guard officer at Kent State University on May 4 typed: “None.” Of all the thousands of pages of documentation spawned by the shootings, there may be no sadder testament than those two “nones.”

My spouse and I have been watching the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary, which is quite good and surprisingly (to me) open about not only the many ways we the United States fucked everything up but also the ways Vietnam could never really have ended any other way. The soldiers interviewed are from all or almost all the contingents involved, and all say the same things: the other side had people who were brave and talented, the way they got through the war was to dehumanize the enemy, everyone did terrible things, everyone found themselves bonded to their comrades, everyone hated parts of it and loved other parts, everyone has regrets and has pride, everyone would rather not have been there, everyone lost. No one won the Crusades. No one won in Afghanistan, any time it's happened. And no one won the Vietnam War.

What I hadn't really understood, in ways, was how violently angry and scared certain segments of the US population were of the ways that some students in some places were vocal and loud and present in their disapproval of this thing the country was doing. How much of a systemic, existential threat student protests seemed to be to some of these men. And when the documentary briefly mentioned Kent State, ya them immediately re-read this, a book I don't love about something that still boggles the mind. Not that the shooting happened, but that in its wake, polls showed a significant majority of Americans supported the National Guard in murdering unarmed students who were milling around in a parking lot. I mean, it shouldn't surprise me, but it always does.

And the book goes perhaps a little too hard trying to be fair to the National Guardsmen deployed on campus. Their youth and inexperience were hit on heavily, so much so that it starts to feel in places as though Means is trying really hard to make it clear that the individual Guards aren't necessarily to blame. But like. Fuck that.

You should also look up the Jackson State killings, just after Kent State, and the Orangeburg Massacre, a couple of years before. These (and other) murders of Black students on the campuses of HBCU by police never get the press Kent State does, and should, obviously, and also help round out why Kent State got the kinds of attention it did. Means makes an interesting argument that Kent State's press attention muted student protests for generations afterwards, and he might be right: in my age, students didn't do much of that. We did the occasional die-in, but in heavily marked and specific areas, with permits, and with continual swiveling eyes to make sure no one caused a ruckus.

Thank the universe the Youths don't seem to have the same leftover fear my generation must have picked up from our parents about it.

Rabbit Hole - Kate Brody

She insists on identifying his body alone, and I let her. For now, I am glad, but I will be angry later when I can’t be sure if the bloated, bruised, waterlogged version in my head is more or less grotesque than the real thing. I will grow jealous of her for getting to see him, for the visual proof that convinces even the most stubborn parts of her brain that he is dead.

I wanted to like this so much more than I did. It's fine, I mean, it's all right. It moves quickly and some of the character moments are nicely done, and for most of its runtime it doesn't shy away from giving our protagonist consequences for her actions. But I just felt, like I do with a lot of "thriller"-type novels, everything wrapped up unsatisfyingly. Too neatly, or too on-the-nose messily, or both.

There were, of course, moments I quite liked: the way our protagonist slips slowly at first and then suddenly misses a handhold and plunges headlong into Reddit's true crime quicksand. The ways her friends and colleagues do their best to help her get away from it, to help her escape any of the terrible, dangerous people she starts to surround herself with. But overall I just wanted this to be more like I Have Some Questions for You (Makkai) than it was.

Menewood - Nicola Griffith

She remembered how it felt to watch a wound close, to feel the gratitude. It was when the wound was healed that you forgot what to be grateful for and remembered only what the wound had taken.

I loved Hild, the first of these, and had so little interest in continuing the story that I didn't even know this had been published until insomnia had me scrolling "available now" + "fantasy" ebooks in my library and I saw Griffith's name. The thing about the Hild books, so far, is that they suck in the reader, if that reader is me, and you look up and your eyes are blurry from the ways the relatively little you know about this particular time period (Scyld Scefing, the shield and the sheaves, the good king, so many classes with that one professor who loved Beowulf and would declaim if we were good) somehow blossom in the memory while you read these books. The sounds of it, and the ways each word's meaning is both objectively openly stated (Butcherbird) and also layered and too thick to see because you're standing in the wrong time. I liked the first one more, but I do not regret reading this one, not a lick.

Learned by Heart - Emma Donoghue

How glorious a time this is for the education of girls!

I need to stop accidentally reading books I haven't the slightest idea of what they're about (no I don't). I glanced at the synopsis of this, didn't consciously recognize any of the names, and only two-thirds through did I realize it was about Anne Lister.

And, too, about class and race and mental illness, about the weird pressure cooker of female friendships in certain times and places, about sex and love and hatred and betrayal, about the worst of these, indifference. And it was good, all Donoghues are good. But I wouldn't have read it if I'd realized going in who it was about, because so much of the writing about Lister pisses me off.

I am, to be clear, glad I did: Donoghue does very good work, as always, and makes everyone in this book very nearly seem to be reacting to things in ways that are appropriate for who they are.

Strong Poison / Gaudy Night - Dorothy L. Sayers

“Why? Oh, well - I thought you'd be rather an attractive person to marry. That's all. I mean, I sort of took a fancy to you. I can't tell you why. There's no rule about it, you know.”

I mean. Come on. The other two Wimsey books with Harriet in them are fine. I've read precisely 0 non-Harriet-containing Wimsey books and so can't speak to them, although I've heard that Murder Must Advertise is quite good. But for me, it's only ever and always Strong Poison and Gaudy Night.

In some ways the Wimsey books, read now, almost feel like deconstructions or parodies: Wimsey himself is so easy to misread as a bumbling genius, if you miss all the moments his war trauma pops up, or his purposeful donning of the mask to ease his way, or the utter convincedness of his own innate worthlessness he carries around with him. And Harriet, perfect and perfect and terrifying and perfect. I love her. Gaudy Night holds up better on reread than first time through, but I loved Strong Poison passionately day one and have never wavered.

The Plague Dogs - Richard Adams

A quick run past the rabbits' execution shed, a turn around the kittens' quicklime pit, a moment's hesitation beyond the monkeys' gas-chamber--and they are gone: ay, not so long ago these canines fled away into the storm. It would be pleasant to report that that night Dr. Boycott dreamt of many a woe, and all his whitecoat-men with shade and form of witch and demon and large coffin-worm were long be-nightmared. One might even have hoped to add that Tyson the old died palsy-twitched, with meagre face deform. But in fact--as will be seen--none of these things happened.

Jesus fuckin' christ, y'all.

Watership Down is my favorite book. I've read it more times than I can remember; Bigwig and the shining wire is one of my first reading memories, me five or six in my pink-walled bedroom sobbing, terrified to turn the page because what if. I've read it over and over and tattooed an emblem from it on my arm, and I've read its much less good sequel of short stories a dozen times or more as well.

I'd never read this, Adams's other book (he wrote lots of other books, but if you've read Adams you've probably read this or Watership). I've read half of it, a few times, before it got so sad I had to stop, so upsetting I had to return it immediately. It's about animal experimentation, and the cruelty humans do to thinking, feeling creatures to make money -- for regardless of what we claim it's for, we do it for money, and we prune away whatever parts of ourselves object, most of us, because it's easier that way.

Anyway it's fuckin' heartbreaking and I won't probably ever read it again but it 's well done and it's got the Adams thing of xenofiction that doesn't make the animals human at all. They're not. They're dogs, or sheep, or foxes (or rabbits). We're not meant to truly understand them. We're just guests in their heads for a moment.

Flux - Jinwoo Chong

“I want you to comb through all the things you can name about the way people of our world consume energy, conserve energy, waste energy, how we are primed to accept the system for what it is and do nothing about it under a complex of fear. And when you’re done with all of that, I want you to forget it, all of it. I want you to listen to me and learn a new word: Flux.”

What if Elizabeth Holmes invented self-renewing batteries instead? This one kept changing in my hands, and I loved it, and I can't wait for Chong's next book, guys.

Cruel Seduction - Katee Robert

There’s probably some symbolism here. Olympus seems to love that shit. Nothing is straightforward and no one says what they mean.

I really loved the first few of this series. That I have felt less and less happy with each subsequent one is, I think, a failing of mine. The books are fine.

Three Eight One - Aliya Whiteley

We build our reason for being alive from the experiences we have lived. Not only that: we build it from the lives other people have lived, and it doesn’t matter whether they make any sense to us or not.

Tags: metanarrative, archaeology, quests, camping, codes, puzzles, footnotes, archival studies, myth

No but for real this fucked me up. I read a bunch of Whiteley last year and was excited to read this one. It's not at all interested in a coherent narrative, though it does make one (or two) along the way. It wants to play, very much, with perception, with time, with signs and signifiers, and it was successful in so doing.

Liar City - Allie Therin

“I know. I got your auto-response.” Grayson read it out. “'I don’t use my phone behind the wheel and neither should you. Hashtag drive like an empath.' Are you capable of communication without sass?”

I don't like the romance burgeoning in this, at all, for reasons, but I really, really enjoyed a lot of the worldbuilding. I liked the takes on how government and corporate entities would dance around each other. I liked the elements of tech and hustle culture. I liked parts, though not the totality, of the ending sequences. And I mostly, though not entirely, liked our protagonist, most of the time. I will note that there is a moment in which we the audience see something that our protagonists don't that immediately unraveled what was going to happen in basically the whole second half of the novel, which I didn't mind but didn't expect.

This Wretched Valley - Jenny Kiefer

For a moment, she glimpsed the spot where the chunk had broken away, a moment that stretched and extended. The rock bled. It gushed like a waterfall. As if she'd injured it.

Good, she thought.

This was fine. Actually it was pretty well-executed for what it was, and the slow build up was nicely managed. A perfectly fine read curled up in bed trying to distract oneself from a broken ankle.

The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells

It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.

I'm not going to tell you anything about Murderbot that isn't just that I love it and I love the books and you should read them. I'm rereading them all so I can read the newest one fresh and happy and terrified for my beloveds.

Spear - Nicola Griffith

“Take your joy, then, child, just tell me no more about it, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Ugh. (That's a good sound) This is queer and magical and strange the way the best Griffiths can be, and I got about eh a quarter of the way through and had to pause to google something and then scream into a pillow for a long minute. Anyway it's great.

Page & Sommers - Cat Sebastian / The Will Darling Adventures - K. J. Charles

Some people responded to brushes with death with an urgent need for sex. James did not. James responded to brushes with death with an urgent need for barbiturates or, failing that, a place to quietly panic.

“My grateful nation wasn’t grateful enough to give me a job. I pawned my medals to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly, and I’ll tell you what, the Military Cross doesn’t fetch a great deal, no matter how many bars you have on it. The pawnbroker told me I should have tried for a Victoria Cross. That would be worth something, he said."

IDK pals I found these extremely similar stories very soothing and will probably read more of this exact type of thing because it softened some element of my brain that made it easier to sleep for a hot minute.

The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour - Jacqueline Alnes

I don't have a quote for this one because I tried to not hold onto any one moment for very long. My eating disorder is an old and constant companion and for years I could truthfully say it was well controlled. Less so the last couple of months. For a lot of reasons. I never did the fruit cure, never went raw vegan, never did the versions of restrictions that would qualify for something like this. But I did find some value in the pointing out of the racist and sexist and religious roots of raw veganism, and the ways "wellness culture" can so easily and cheerfully cloak horrifically disordered eating. I don't recommend this book but I did finish it, so there's something to that, I suppose.

See you cool kids next month.

xoxo, S