reading log #4
I haven’t written one of these in a while, but I have been reading a lot. Last weekend I turned in a draft of romance #3, aka SELF-INDULGENCE, and was so wiped out by the experience that I had to refuel with a 600+ page fantasy novel. (THE RAVEN SCHOLAR by Antonia Hodgson; a surprisingly quick read for a book that long, which both is and isn’t a compliment.)
Other than that, though, mostly what I’ve been reading recently is Martha Wells’ MURDERBOT books. For a massively popular phenomenon (there’s a TV show starring Alexander Skarsgaard!) they’re sort of hard to describe. The logline I’ve settled on is “robot-human hybrid built for violence goes rogue, becomes self-aware, and instead of instigating mayhem has an existential crisis and watches a lot of soap operas (and begrudgingly solves mysteries).” There’s a Sherlock Holmes thing to them, if Sherlock lived in a corporate-owned sci-fi hellscape, was more honest about how alienated he is by the people around him, and his drug of choice was bad TV.
Honestly someone could probably diagnose me with something based on how much I like books about wounded consciousnesses trapped in a body and world they don’t totally understand how to inhabit (see also: Ann Leckie’s ANCILLARY JUSTICE series). But we don’t need to go there in this newsletter, especially given that both of these examples are massive hits, so at least I’m not alone.
It has been particularly nice to read these books given where they fall in Wells’ career. She published her first novel in 1993, and while she was successful enough to keep working for the next few decades, she didn’t have a “breakthrough” until the first Murderbot came out in 2018.
I’ll get into more when I do end-of-year financials, but 2025 has been a disaster both professionally and financially. I’ve lost several regular gigs; every time something has seemed like it’s coming along to replace them, it’s fallen through at the last minute. Everyone I know who works in a creative industry is either unemployed and panicking or employed and panicking about what will happen when they aren’t anymore because there are? no? jobs? In the decade I’ve been doing this, I’ve taken refuge from the lack of staff jobs in journalism by freelancing, and then when there weren’t enough freelancing gigs left I jumped to podcasting but that’s contracting and contracting and you can’t work in TV anymore and only romance novels are selling and I’m selling those but it’s not enough to live on, let me tell you what. The copywriters are getting replaced by AI.
In general I would say it feels pretty impossible to exist in the world right now. So the other thing I’ve been consuming in regular doses is Taskmaster, a British gameshow where comedians do absurd, often surreal tasks at the whims of their hosts, a pair of men whose psychosexual dynamic is also best left to another newsletter.
It’s easy to describe Taskmaster in a way that minimizes its resonance: yeah, man, we are all at the whims of cruel dictators there days! Must be comforting to see that reduced and made artful and comedic and occasionally profound and also hilarious!! But like… whatever, fuck off, it is.
I think it helps that the show wasn’t intended to be a Commentary. In fact often it seems more like an arcanely British humiliation ritual that creator Alex Horne came up with because regular kink wasn’t logistically complicated enough for him. The plain, deep absurdity is just a side effect. For instance: there’s this one task where contestant have to write something, and so many of them get furious that there’s no pen in the room. But there is a pen tied to a string, dangling from the ceiling. Every one of them nearly walked into it when they came through the door.
At the end of the summer I read a horror novel called OUR SHARE OF THE NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez. Much of it takes place in Argentina in the 70’s and 80’s, during and after its military dictatorship. The book is about brutality and generational curses; about the specialized kinds of cruelty you can get away with in a world structured by large, cruel systems. It’s operatic and sometimes melodramatic, baggy, arguably twice as long as it needs to be. I loved it anyway, though I understand why not everyone would.
I was also conscious, reading it, that I wanted something more than usual from the text. I wanted to know how other people survived living under dictatorships. I wanted to know that you could. That you could integrate that experience into art, yes, but also just into anything. Your own understanding of the world could survive this kind of cruelty, chaos, fracture.
I keep saying your but I think we both know I should be saying my.
Anyway. We persevere. When I am not reading or writing I am probably at SELAH’s Wednesday Drop Ins, which serve as a source of gravity, keeping my feet on the ground. That one is hard to write about because it’s mostly hearing stories that aren’t mine to tell. But we are running a fundraiser to help keep the programs going, and it would mean a lot to me if you could donate.