aamcnamara | Reading

This has been four-fifths written since mid-September. May as well finish a thing, to the extent that memory serves.

( cathedrals, montmartre, rodin, eiffel )

Potential wrapup of random bits that didn't fit anywhere else coming, um, maybe.

elisem

There's someone who is trying to raise funds for memorial services and to bury his brother who died of exposure last weekend. I'll just say what I said on bluesky:

His family wants to do memorial services in Minneapolis and in Wisconsin where he was born and will be buried.

If you've felt grief, if you've comforted people in grief, please help these folks.

(My own mother died this morning.

If you were gonna bring me a hot dish,

please give here instead.)

https://www.gofundme.com/f/honoring-harold-lightfeather-benny-boy

Thank you.
And thank you also for sharing the info elsewhere as well if you can.

elisem

Here's where I am today, I guess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InyT9Gyoz_o

elisem

After some trouble getting ahold of me, my sister has let me know that our mother died this morning.

(So maybe don't assume I remember anything I'm supposed to remember this week?)
My sister and her husband continue to be awesome in these matters. As does Juan.

OK. Gonna go have food and meds now.

elisem

...EXTREME COLD WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 9 PM THURSDAY TO 11 AM CST

FRIDAY...

...EXTREME COLD WATCH NOW IN EFFECT FROM FRIDAY MORNING THROUGH

SATURDAY MORNING...

* WHAT...For the Extreme Cold Warning, dangerously cold wind chills

of 35 to 45 below expected. For the Extreme Cold Watch, dangerously

cold wind chills as low as 35 below possible.

* WHERE...Portions of central, east central, south central,

southeast, southwest, and west central Minnesota and northwest and

west central Wisconsin.

* WHEN...For the Extreme Cold Warning, from 9 PM Thursday to 11 AM

CST Friday. For the Extreme Cold Watch, from Friday morning through

Saturday morning.

* IMPACTS...The dangerously cold wind chills as low as 45 below zero

could cause frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes.

And where is this for?

URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE

National Weather Service Twin Cities/Chanhassen MN

1202 PM CST Wed Jan 21 2026

MNZ051>070-073>078-082>085-091>093-WIZ014>016-023>028-220615-

/O.NEW.KMPX.EC.W.0001.260123T0300Z-260123T1700Z/

/O.EXT.KMPX.EC.A.0001.260123T1700Z-260124T1800Z/

Sherburne-Isanti-Chisago-Lac Qui Parle-Swift-Chippewa-Kandiyohi-

Meeker-Wright-Hennepin-Anoka-Ramsey-Washington-Yellow Medicine-

Renville-McLeod-Sibley-Carver-Scott-Dakota-Redwood-Brown-Nicollet-

Le Sueur-Rice-Goodhue-Watonwan-Blue Earth-Waseca-Steele-Martin-

Faribault-Freeborn-Polk-Barron-Rusk-St. Croix-Pierce-Dunn-Pepin-

Chippewa-Eau Claire-

Including the cities of Chippewa Falls, St Peter, Mankato,

Stillwater, Victoria, Hudson, Fairmont, Blue Earth, Hutchinson,

Olivia, Faribault, Gaylord, Waseca, Owatonna, Benson, Madison, Elk

River, Redwood Falls, New Ulm, Cambridge, River Falls, St Paul,

Minneapolis, Menomonie, Shakopee, Red Wing, Durand, Blaine,

Chanhassen, St James, Center City, Litchfield, Monticello, Osceola,

Montevideo, Granite Falls, Albert Lea, Willmar, Hastings, Rice Lake,

Eau Claire, Ladysmith, Le Sueur, and Chaska

And what do we do?

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

Dress in layers including a hat, face mask, and gloves if you must go

outside.

Keep pets indoors as much as possible.

Which mostly means "Keep yer ass indoors! You, and your little dog too!"
And also means "Look after each other. We keep us safe." OK? OK then.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish the bag for the supply depot and start on one for Pow Wow Grounds.

What's the weather going to be doing where you are? And how are the people in your neighborhood?

bloodygranuaile

After several months of threatening people with a bad time, I finally talked my book club into reading Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped our World. I read this book with another book club about two years ago and it is one of those books that permanently rewired my brain. Ever since I finished it then, I’ve wanted to reread it, if only because some of the sequences of events discussed are complicated and I need to make sure I know these things. It seems like important stuff to be able to speak knowledgeably about at the drop of a hat–not even for picking fights with people you disagree with, which I don’t spend a lot of time doing, but to be able to talk to reasonably well-meaning people about how everything is so much worse than they realize.

These days, people are certainly beginning to realize that a lot of things are bad, but what’s often missing among the various well-intentioned liberal platitudes of this “not being who we are” is that much of the current fuckitude going on at home is part of something annoying lefties like me call the “imperial boomerang,” where we do fucked-up shit in other countries and then we bring it home. We have not yet, so far, brought home Operation Annihilation, the Indonesian military coup that postured as having stopped a different Indonesian military coup and which deliberately murdered a million Indonesians in the course of six months, and chucked another million into concentration camps. But if you’ve spent any time at all listening to the rhetoric of our fascist far right lately, you know at least some of them want to.

Anyway, I’m not sure I have much to say this read-through that I didn’t have to say in my review the first time around, but I’m excited to once again be upset about this book in good company. Everyone should read this book but I do not recommend reading it alone! Have people to process it with!

sartorias

Our space opera Exordium began life as a mini-series screenplay over four decades ago, morphed into a mass-market paperback, returned as a hastily corrected e-book series, and now is relaunching for the last time after Dave and I, now retired, were able to go over it more slowly. It always needed a more thorough going-over. But also, over the years, so much has changed!

From Exordium’s beginning we’ve struggled with the skiamorphs (shadow shapes—like wood grain on plastic) that are left not only when you move between media, but when your forty-year-old vision of a technology’s cultural impact collides with present-day reality.

The world of Exordium was always a future world replete with echoes of a distant, earthly past that let us shove in all the things we loved in books, art, film, and TV and use them to create the kind of science fiction/space opera we liked.

We were a couple of twenty-somethings in 1977 when Star Wars came out. Younger readers probably can’t imagine the impact of that film on a generation accustomed to SF movies that were either glorified monster fights or preachy future-shock stories filled with plastic furniture and tight jumpsuits that would take an hour to get out of if you had to pee.

On our way out of the 2:30 a.m. showing, we looked at each other and said, “We can do that, but . . . tech that makes sense!”

“More than one active woman!”

“FTL battles that make strategic sense in four-space!”

“More than one active woman!”

Together: “Pie fights! Fart jokes! Ancient civilizations! Cool clothes and machines!”

Thus was born Exordium. At the time Sherwood worked as a flunky in Hollywood, so the first version was a six hour miniseries. On the strength of it we got a good Hollywood agent, and there was a bid war shaping up between NBC and the then-new HBO when . . . boom! The mega-strike of 1980. When that was over, the studios were so depleted that min-series projects were put on hold—for the most part a euphemism for “killed.”

So we decided to turn it into books—and that meant breaking the chains of “can’t do that on TV,” developing the sketchy cultures, and completely rethinking the necessarily limited space battles, which had been confined to bridge scenes with rudimentary 1980s style FX. Dave dived into military history to figure out more about how the ships and tech he’d come up with would fight. Sherwood delved into cultural history to develop the social and political maneuvering we wanted.

Dave also got into high-tech PR and started thinking harder about how the technologies of the future would change humanity. Our world acquired an interstellar ship-switched data network. Our characters acquired “boswells.” Today we call them smartphones, which don’t yet have neural induction for subvocalized privacy. Boswells were (and are) great plot devices, with an intricate etiquette of usage.

But we totally missed social media. That wasn’t a problem, of course, when we sold the series to Tor in 1990, where, despite an awesome editor and nice covers, it mostly vanished into the black hole of the mass market crash. But now we’re bringing them back. Thirty years into the future we didn’t see, which features a publishing industry that didn’t see it either.

The challenge with retrofitting SF is: what do you do with science fiction that purports to take place in the future, but contains elements that look, well, quaint? You either grit your teeth and reissue the book as a period piece, or you rewrite it. And if you choose the latter, what’s inside the can may be more Elder God than annelid.

A lot of what was daring in our original (in our future, everyone is brown, with white being the largely unwanted exception; gay relationships are a part of everyday life, as well as polyamory, etc) is now commonly found, which is great. But other aspects were tougher. In Exordium, we had to wrestle again with the original screenplay, much of which still shadowed the story, especially in the first book. The language that would pass Programs & Practices in 1980 required made-up cusswords; the default for soldiers and action characters was male; by the nineties Dave had developed the idea of the boswells but in Exordium, everyone seemed to be running to computer stations for communication.

We kept the cuss words. Many readers don’t like neologisms, especially for profanity, but the Exordium idiolect had become too much a part of the worldbuilding: for example, the word “fuck” is a great expletive, but it also carries centuries of negative baggage. In our world, sex had completely shed the guilt, especially for women, so we jettisoned slang and idiom that still evoked that old misogynism.

Everything else needed a serious revamp, including the complex battle scenes, which had to be purged of the last traces of non-relativistic widescreen physics. (It helped that some very competent military gamers had developed an Exordium tactical board game based on the paperbacks.)

Rewriting wasn’t all work. One of the joys of revisiting a world in this way is discovering the zings, connections, and hidden history you missed the first time around. Rewriting becomes like looking into a Mandelbrot kaleidoscope.

We kept the fun elements: A playboy prince with unexpected depths, a gang of space pirates and their ass-kicking female captain, ancient weapons from a war lost by the long-vanished masters of the galaxy, coruscating beams of lambent light, intricate space battles where light speed delay is both trap and tool, twisted aristocratic politics more deadly than a battlefield, a bizarre race of sophonts that venerates the Three Stooges, a male chastity device mistaken for the key to ultimate power…

And yes, a high tech pie fight.

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skygiants

For the first few chapters that I read, I was enjoying Ava Morgyn's The Bane Witch, as heroine Piers Corbin heroically Gone Girled herself out of an abusive marriage by faking a combo poisoning-drowning and flailed her injured way north to seek refuge with a mysterious aunt, accidentally leaving a fairly significant trail behind her. Satisfying! Suspenseful! I was looking forward to seeing how she was gonna get out of this one!

Then Piers did indeed get north to the aunt and tap into her Family Birthright of Magical Revenge Poisoning. As the actual plot geared up, the more I understood what type of good time I was being expected to have, and, alas, the more it did, the less of a good time I was having.

So the way the family magic works is that all of the Corbin women have the magical ability -- nay, compulsion! -- to eat poison ingredients and convert them internally into a toxin that they can -- nay, must! -- use to murder Bad Men. It's always Men. They're always Bad. They know the men are Bad because they are also granted magical visions explaining how Bad they are. They absolutely never kill women (there are only ever women born in this family; they have to give male babies away at birth in case they accidentally kill them with their poison, and I don't think Ava Morgyn has ever heard of a trans person) or the innocent!

...except of course that the whole family is actually threatening to kill Piers, to protect themselves, if she doesn't accept her powers and start heroically murdering Bad Men. But OTHER THAN THAT they absolutely never kill women, or the innocent, so please have no qualms on that account! Piers' aunt explains: "Yes, Piers. Whatever has happened to you, you must never forget that there are predators and there are prey. We hunt the former, not the latter."

By the way, both irredeemably Bad Men that form the focus of Badness in this book -- Piers' evil and abusive husband, and the local serial killer who is also incidentally on the loose -- are shown to have been abused in childhood by irredeemably Bad Women, but we're not getting into that. There are Predators and there are Prey!

The book wants to make sure we understand that it's very important, righteous and ethical for the Cobin family to keep doing what they're doing because everybody knows nobody believes abused women and therefore vigilante justice is the only form of justice available. There are two cops in the book, by the way. One of them is the nice and ethical local sheriff who is Piers' love interest, who is allowing her to help him hunt the local serial killer despite being suspicious that she may have poisoned several people. The other is the nice and ethical local cop investigating her supposed murder back home, who is desperate to prove she's alive because she saved his life and he's very grateful. He understands about abuse, because his name is Reyes and he's from the Big City and his mother and sister were both abused by Bad Men. The problem with these good and handsome cops is that they're actually not willing enough to murder people, which is where Piers comes in:

HANDSOME GOOD COP BOYFRIEND: You don't want to help me arrest him, do you? You want to kill him.
PIERS: Doesn't he deserve it?
HANDSOME GOOD COP BOYFRIEND: That's not for us to decide.
PIERS: Isn't it? This is our community. You're an authority in maintaining law and order, and I'm a victim of domestic and sexual violence. Surely, there is no one more qualified than us.

This book was a USA Today bestseller, which does not surprise me. It taps into exactly the part of the cultural hindbrain that loves true crime, and serial killers, and violence that you can feel good about, in an uncomplicated way, because it's being meted out to Unquestionably Bad People. Justice is when bad people suffer and die. We're not too worried about how they turned out to be bad people. There are predators, and there are prey.

queenoftheskies

Back in 2007, I started a story in one segment of my series entitled Dumps, Dives & Divas. Over the years, I would add to it. It would change direction. Until I decided wasn't the story I wanted to use to present my series to readers.

I wanted to start with before my characters came to Earth.

I have 5 of those novels finished and several others almost finished. I had plans for them, the order I was going to release them in, etc.

(You're going to laugh at me from this point on.)

Until I saw K-Pop Demon Hunters, I was going to finish another one of those pre-Earth novels.

But, once I saw it, I realized, as popular as it was, there might be a better market for DDD first.

Why?

Because my aliens on Earth became rock stars and used the cover of their concerts to go to areas where they needed to fight monsters. This was originally going to be my introduction to music as magic in my series.

So, I pulled it out, finished it and started revising.

Another point that might be in its favor is that my characters have "magic armor", and Disney is talking about making an all new Power Rangers to release. And, there's magic/tech armor there.

So, this is where I am currently:

book cover

Need to finish revisions.

Need to find beta readers.

Need to revise again.

And, hope that decision to pull this novel out of the trunk pays off.

Edited to add: I've only shown this cover to my kids and to a friend I write with. Would love reactions if anyone has one.

I just got the finished file the end of last weeek.

shadaras

threesentenceficathon began yesterday! I've posted... more fills than I think so far. xD I started listing them and then went HM OKAY THAT'S A BUNCH ACTUALLY:
Leverage ot3 fluff
Obi-Wan/Asajj post-PT AU [also on ao3 because it got away from me a bit xD]
Julien's unrequited feels for Aranessa (CR Araman)
Silt Verses, godsummoning
Olruggio/Qifrey angst (WHA)
Kara/Lee (the thin line between fighting and fucking) (BSG 2003)
Thimble+Occtis reunion (CR Araman)
Jyn/Cassian, after the war (I wanna clean this up into a proper fic xD)
Jyn/Cassian, nightmares
LHoD, Genly Ai+Estraven, nightfall
Hal+Bolaire, theater (CR Araman)
Obi-Wan/Padme, "love is stronger than hate"
Sophie/Howl, "I've never done anything wrong in my life"
Teor/Wicander, nonhuman cocks/first time (CR Araman)

I also posted some prompts. They're hiding in there somewhere. But mostly the fun is in making little ficlets, for me.

[eta: I'm adding to this list as I go, mostly for my own records/ability to find them again later]

2.
I've watched through s3e3 of Star Trek: Discovery, and I adore Starfleet Honor but also every time Georgiou is on screen making snarky comments and beating people up and looking at Michael with maternal pride I care naught for Starfleet Honor because I'm too busy thinking about how much Georgiou is delighted to see Michael get rougher around the edges after her time alone in the future.

This also means I have just met Adira Tal, who I know will become a major character and who is also going to come out as nonbinary once we get more into that story, and I am curious about how that'll unfold considering that Adira has a Trill symbiote and I have some feelings (mostly sighs) about nonbinary characters and the plurality aspects of such an arrangement. But hey, can't really have proper opinions on it until I see how it plays out in the show, you know?

3.
Testing at my dojo went very well! Love to see two people take very good tests perfectly appropriate to their level! Love also to see one of them have a worse randori than usual simply because he was clearly exhausted by the time he reached it, but hey even that was still perfectly reasonable for the level the test expects; I just know what he's capable of.

It was also like "HUH OKAY" seeing him do one technique (hanmi handachi shomenuchi iriminage) because I saw my own technique in how he did it. I get it! I know why! I did it with him a bunch when he was learning it! I just!

I do not think of myself as One Of The Sensei despite it being pretty clear that a lot of the white belts absolutely do think of me that way. This is mostly because I don't teach regularly, and so nobody calls me sensei on the regular.

4.
This weekend has been full of CLASSIC WINTER SNOW. After testing yesterday I detoured to the local state park and spent an hour walking a path that was very covered in snow and also icy beneath said snow. There were a couple other people out in the closer bits of this path, but once I turned onto the loop fewer people tend to go on anyway, it was clear that nobody had been there for at least a hour, so it was all FRESH CLEAR SNOW and that was gorgeous and really peaceful to spend time in.

I know intellectually how relaxing and restorative it is for me to spend time in the woods, especially if I can find woods where I won't hear/see other humans, but it's always a bit of an oh! right! feeling when I experience it again. Shall try and hold on to it, but it's always easier to go out into the woods during the beautiful times than when winter fades once more into dreary slushy/icy grayness instead of this perfect high-contrast fresh new fluffy snow.

Pictures under the cut! I took way more than this but I didn't feel like uploading all of them and I think these are nicely representative!

( four photos from a snowy walk in the woods )

jazzfish

Just finished Lord of the Rings. This may well have been the first time I read the Appendices all the way through (though I did skim the ones on the calendars and the alphabets).

Two takeaways from RotK:

First, the Scouring of the Shire hits different when you're under occupation. It's also perhaps the most fantastical part of the book, since it posits that the citizenry were nearly all ready to rise up and just needed a push, as opposed to a third of them cheering on Otho and Sharkey and a third of them just hunkering down and hoping it would all pass them by.

Second, the meme take on Denethor as 'doomscrolling in the Palantir to Sauron's algorithm' is ... remarkably apt.

Now ebooks for a couple of days, and then once I'm home the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. UT is, as I recall, mostly-complete fragments with some commentary. The twelve-volume History of Middle-Earth reverses the proportions, and is thus less interesting to me. UT also contains a version of the Quest of Erebor ("The Hobbit") as told from Gandalf's perspective, which should be neat.

All quiet on bus stop patrol. Tuesday had a couple of plateless SUVs and a couple of blocks-away whistle choruses; Thursday and yesterday were quiet. It's nice to be out in the snow in my black wool coat and hat, though, and nice to get some smiles from folks driving past.

asakiyume

I don't like to go so long without posting! Just offline stuff piling on (nothing personally dire, though). The offline stuff is doing a number on my ability to write, but I still manage to squeeze out microfictions, though not quite daily. Here's one from a few days ago:

I dreamed of a pharaoh, awaking after death and arranging to his liking the various precious items buried with him.

"You've got quite an ego," I snapped at him (dream-me is apparently rude to people's faces), "having this massive pyramid built just so people would remember you."

"That's not why I had it built. It's for all the stories that collect around it. Adventures, time travel, curses, beings from the stars--I hear them all, and they entertain me," he replied.

And here's a sweet video my tutor sent me of Martin, a pygmy marmoset monkey, whining at Gordo-the-dog, who's relaxing.

mrissa

P.F. Chisholm, A Suspicion of Silver. Ninth in its mystery series, set late in the reign of Elizabeth I/in the middle of when James I and VI was still just James VI. I don't recommend starting it here, because there was a moment when I wailed, "no, not [name]!" when you won't have a very strong sense of that character from just this book. Pretty satisfying for where it is in its series, though, still enjoying. Especially as they have returned to the north, which I like much better.

Joan Coggin, Who Killed the Curate?. A light British mid-century mystery, first in its series and I'm looking forward to reading more. If you were asked to predict what a book published in 1944 with this title would be like, you would have this book absolutely bang on the nose, so if you read that title and went "ooh fun," go get it, and if you read that title and thought "oh gawd not another of those," you're not wrong either. I am very much in the "ooh fun" camp.

Matt Collins with Roo Lewis, Forest: A Journey Through Wild and Magnificent Landscapes. Photos and essays about forests, not entirely aided by its printer printing it a little toward the sepia throughout. Still a relaxing book if you are a Nice Books About Nice Trees fan, which I am.

John Darnielle, This Year: A Book of Days (365 Songs Annotated). When I first saw John Darnielle/The Mountain Goats live, I recognized him. I don't mean that I knew him before, I mean that I taught a lot of people like him physics labs once upon a time: people who had seen a lot of shit and now would like to learn some nice things about quantum mechanics please. Anyway this book was fun and interesting and confirmed that Darnielle is exactly who you'd think he was from listening to the Mountain Goats all this time.

Nadia Davids, Cape Fever. A short mildly speculative novel about a servant girl in Cape Town navigating life with a controlling and unpleasant employer. Beautifully written and gentle in places you might not have thought possible. Looking forward to whatever else Davids does.

Djuna, Counterweight. Weird space elevator novella (novel? very short one if so) in a highly corporate Ruritanian world with strong Korean cultural influences (no surprise as this is in translation from Korean). I think this slipped by a lot of SFF people and maybe shouldn't have.

Margaret Frazer, This World's Eternity. Kindle. I continue to dislike the short stories that result from Frazer trying to write Shakespeare's version of historical figures rather than what she thinks they would actually have been like. Does that mean I'll stop reading these? Hmm, I think there's only one left.

Drew Harvell, The Ocean's Menagerie: How Earth's Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life. If you like the subgenre There's Weird Stuff In The Ocean, which I do, this is a really good one of those. Gosh is there weird stuff in the ocean. Very satisfying.

Rupert Latimer, Murder After Christmas. Another light British murder mystery from 1944, another that is basically exactly what you think it is. What a shame he didn't have the chance to write a lot more.

Wen-Yi Lee, When They Burned the Butterfly. Gritty and compelling, small gods and teenage girl gangs in 1970s Singapore. Singular and great. Highly recommended.

Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older, eds., We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope. There's some really lovely stuff in here, and a wide variety of voices. Basically this is what you would want this kind of anthology to be.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. I don't pick your subtitles, authors. You and your editors are doing that. So when you claim to be a history of sex and Christianity...that is an expectation you have set. And when you don't include the Copts or the Nestorians or nearly anything about the Greek or Russian Orthodox folks and then you get to the 18th and 19th centuries and sail past the Shakers and the free love Christian communes...it is not my fault that I grumble that your book is in no way a history of sex and Christianity, you're the one that claimed it was that and then really wanted to do a history of semi-normative Western Christian sex among dominant populations. What a disappointment.

Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Spells and The Lost Words (reread). I accidentally got both of these instead of just one, but they're both brief and poetic about nature vocabulary, a good time without being a big commitment.

Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. This is one of those broad-concept pieces of nonfiction, with burial mounds but also mycorrhizal networks. MacFarlane's prose is always readable, and this is a good time.

David Narrett, The Cherokees: In War and At Peace, 1670-1840. And again: I did not choose your subtitle, neighbor. So when you claim that your history goes through 1840...and then everything after 1796 is packed into a really brief epilogue...and I mean, what could have happened to the Cherokees after 1796 but before 1840, surely it couldn't be [checks notes] oh, one of the major events in their history as a people, sure, no, what difference could that make. Seriously, I absolutely get not wanting to write about the Trail of Tears. But then don't tell people you're writing about the Trail of Tears. Honestly, 1670-1800, who could quibble with that. But in this compressed epilogue there are paragraphs admonishing us not to forget about...people we have not learned about in this book and will have some trouble learning about elsewhere because Cherokee histories are not thick on the ground. Not as disappointing as the MacCulloch, but still disappointing.

Tim Palmer, The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. I found this to be a comfort read, which I think a lot of people won't if they haven't already gone through things like disproving hidden variables as a source of quantum uncertainty. But it'll still be interesting--maybe more so--and the stuff he worked on about climate physics is great.

Henry Reece, The Fall: Last Days of the English Republic. If you want a general history, that's the Alice Hunt book I read last fortnight. This is a more specifically focused work about the last approximately two years, the bit between Cromwell's death and the Restoration. Also really well done, also interesting, but doing a different thing. You'll probably get more out of this if you have a solid grasp on the general shape of the period first.

Randy Ribay, The Reckoning of Roku. As regular readers can attest, I mostly don't read media tie-ins--mostly just not interested. But F.C. Yee's Avatar: the Last Airbender work was really good, so I thought, all right, why not give their next author a chance. I'm glad I did. This is a fun YA fantasy novel that would probably work even if you didn't know the Avatar universe but will be even better if you do.

Madeleine E. Robins, The Doxie's Penalty. Fourth in a series of mysteries, but it's written so that you could easily start here. Well-written, well-plotted, generally enjoyable. I was thinking of rereading the earlier volumes of the series, and I'm now more, not less, motivated to do so.

Georgia Summers, The Bookshop Below. I feel like the cover of this was attempting to sell it as a cozy. It is not a cozy. It is a fantasy novel that is centered on books and bookshops, but it is about as cozy as, oh, say, Ink Blood Sister Scribe in that direction. And this is good, not everything with books in it is drama-free, look at our current lives for example. Sometimes it's nice to have a fantasy adventure that acknowledges the importance of story in our lives, and this is one of those times.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lives of Bitter Rain. This is not a novella. It is a set of vignettes of backstory from a particular character in this series. It does not hang together except that, sure, I'm willing to buy that these things happened in this order. I like this series--it was not unpleasant reading--but do not go in expecting more than what it is.

Iida Turpeinen, Beasts of the Sea. A slim novel in translation from Finnish, spanning several eras of attitudes toward natural history in general and the Steller's sea cow in specific. Vivid and moving.

Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. The nation in question is the US, in case you were wondering. This was a generally quite good book about the middle of the 19th century in the US, except of course that that's a pretty big and eventful topic, so all sorts of things are going to have to get left out. But she did her very best to hit the high spots culturally as well as politically, so overall it was the most satisfying bug crusher I've read so far this year.

shadaras

Sometimes adulthood is going "oh wow for once I don't have anything I need to do once I get off work" and promptly going and doing an errand and then washing dishes and doing laundry once getting home.

Assorted brief notes:

1.
My dojo is doing kyu testing this coming Saturday, which will be delightful. The two people testing are more than ready for these tests. (There's another person who we've been trying to get to test for years and it's just a matter of "please come consistently for a few months and take this test already!" at this point.)

2.
Wednesday evening classes are just. Draining. I do not like needing to be at school from 5pm-8pm. I didn't even when I was in college! Now it's just like "I wake up at 4:30am because of work, why must I suffer like this."

Also next week is going to be very boring because this week was a "oh shit the guest instructor suddenly can't make it" week and so they sort of half-assed an unprepared version of what they were gonna do next week. So. You know. I understood what they were teaching from the half-assed version, the teachers know that, but since most of the cohort was like ???, next week will be them going step-by-step through it with more prep. Which will be useful, and is good pedagogy, but is also going to Bore Me.

3.
h/t to

trobadora for talking about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which mostly got me going back to Star Trek: Discovery, since Academy is set after Disco.

which means I am currently re-watching the first episode of s3, because I watched the first two episodes when they first aired and then fell off because... idk, it was Oct/Nov 2020 and I was running headfirst into QZGS and infinite flow cnovels...? But hey, Disco is a fun show, I'm so fond of Michael Burnham, and s3 is in some ways a soft reboot due to being right after the timeskip, so! Looking forward to actually getting to know the future timeline.

I do think that a huge amount of why I fell off is just... 2020 being 2020. Because I don't think I had nearly as much fun with this the first time I watched it, and now I'm just like "wow this is such good tropey fun, s3e1 is using so much good trope stuff to set up Michael/Book".

4.
god I feel like I had some other things. hm.

A podcast reminded me that Escaflowne exists, and that it's an anime that I probably would have been obsessed with as a teenager if I'd seen it then. Mecha and guys with wings. Normal things. xD I feel like it should be on crunchyroll but it's not? Alas. Probably for the best if I'm going to actually watch Star Trek right now, but I do want to at some point experience this show.

5.
Work is very nonsense.

...I think I was going to give examples, but, idk. just. nah. it's! a lot! and mostly not outright bad, just tiring, and takes too much time, as work does.

bloodygranuaile

My big fat slowmaxxing winter break reading was Leo Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina, or at least that was the plan. The book is over 850 pages long and I had been reading some other stuff during the first half of break, so I don’t know what on Earth made me think I was going to read the thing in six days and have a nice fat book already on my list by January 2nd, even if I hadn’t ended up spilling water all over it on December 30 and needing three full days just to dry it out to a readable condition. (It took at least five days to get it fully devoid of moisture again, even when strategically placed right by a heating vent.) Then I had to go back to work, and so here we are, halfway through January, and I have finally finished it.

It was absolutely worth the time and even the damp interruptions.

While Anna is the title character–and certainly provides one of the main storylines–this book has a pretty large cast of characters, and we spend significant inside-their-head time with at least half a dozen of them. The book opens from the point of view of Anna Arkadyevna’s brother Stepan Arkadyevich, a friendly, good-humored specimen of Russia’s upper class, holding various executive-level government jobs that consist entirely of schmoozing and continually cheating on his long-suffering wife with an absolutely clueless lack of malice about it. We also end up spending a lot of page time with his wife Dolly; with Dolly’s little sister Kitty Schterbatskaya; with Konstantin Levin, a friend of Stepan’s who’s in love with Kitty; and of course, with Count Vronsky, the man Anna blows up her life over, who in the beginning is having a flirtation with Kitty that temporarily blows up Levin’s plans to marry her. We also spend some time with Anna’s husband, who I found to be a particularly fascinating character. A lot of the time we spend with these folks they are not necessarily doing very much, although they are all very busy; Levin is basically a little freak among the Russian aristocracy in that he spends a lot of time in his place in the country, not only managing it and trying to come up with better administrative schemes, but also actually doing the occasional spot of farming himself. He’s got very tortured ideas about what it would mean to fix Russian agriculture and how to be alive, which are oddly relatable if you are the type of person prone to overthinking things sometimes, like me, even if the things he is overthinking are entirely outside of my experience (I have no opinions, tortured or otherwise, about 1870s Russian agricultural improvements). These very close third-person POVs are full of dryly funny observations about the absurdities and hypocrisies of these characters, and yet all of them are ultimately sort of endearing (except Vronsky, who is not necessarily actually a bigger piece of shit than any of these other useless rich idiots but who I just could not ever warm up to). The result is both timeless & universal exploring the human condition etc. and also extremely specific, deeply rooted in the time and place that the story takes place in. The place of the church in society, the influence of various 19th-century social and political movements, the state of the divorce and custody laws, the unsustainable financial state of the Russian nobility, all shape the novel and the events that happen in it profoundly, and it simply could not be the novel that it is if it took place somewhere else or at another time.

It is very hard to try to say anything about this book that smarter people than I haven’t said a million times in the past 150 years, I am sure. I haven’t read all that people have said about it but I really don’t feel like I have the chops to comment on a work like this. For starters, everything I know about 1870s Russia is basically running on knowledge of 1870s England and hoping it’s not that vastly different.

One reason I am under-read in the great Russian novels is that every Russian short story or novella I have ever read has been the saddest thing in the entire world, especially Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” which continues to haunt me even as it’s been several years since I’ve read it. As a result I have been a little hesitant to be like “Yes, I want 870 consecutive pages of that.” But somehow, Anna Karenina ends on a hopeful note, even though Anna rather famously dies by throwing herself under a train. The trick to this is that the train thing is a full fifty pages from the end, and we have to tour the entire rest of the dramatic personae afterwards to see how they are reacting to it. Somehow, this works.

This book is just truly excellent on a craft level. While the whole book is long, its story huge and sprawling and taking place over many years, the sentences and chapters are wonderfully clear and direct, especially compared to a lot of other 19th-century writing that I’ve been exposed to. They are only convoluted and long when a character is having convoluted long thoughts, in which case, they work perfectly to illustrate the confusion, heartbreak, dissociation, or just plain disordered thinking that afflicts the characters. Big credit to translator Constance Garnett, since I certainly wasn’t reading the book in the original Russian.

I am extremely curious to check out some of the many, many, many adaptations that have been made, since I really can’t see how they could get across some of the stuff going on in these characters’ heads. Maybe they don’t. But I will find out!

skygiants

On the first weekend of January

genarti and I went along with some friends to the Moby-Dick marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which was such an unexpectedly fun experience that we're already talking about maybe doing it again next year.

The way the marathon works is that people sign up in advance to read three-minute sections of the book and the whole thing keeps rolling along for about twenty-five hours, give or take. You don't know in advance what the section will be, because it depends how fast the people before you have been reading, so good luck to you if it contains a lot of highly specific terminology - you take what you get and you go until one of the organizers says 'thank you!' and then it's the next person's turn. If it seems like they're getting through the book too fast they'll sub in a foreign language reader to do a chapter in German or Spanish. We did not get in on the thing fast enough to be proper readers but we all signed up to be substitute readers, which is someone who can be called on if the proper reader misses their timing and isn't there for their section, and I got very fortunate on the timing and was in fact subbed in to read the forging of Ahab's harpoon! (

genarti ALMOST got even luckier and was right on the verge of getting to read the Rachel, but then the proper reader turned up at the last moment and she missed it by a hair.)

There are also a few special readings. Father Mapple's sermon is read out in the New Bedford church that has since been outfitted with a ship-pulpit to match the book's description (with everyone given a song-sheet to join in chorus on "The Ribs and Terrors Of the Whale") and the closing reader was a professional actor who, we learned afterwards, had just fallen in love with Moby-Dick this past year and emailed the festival with great enthusiasm to participate. The opening chapters are read out in the room where the Whaling Museum has a half-size whaling ship, and you can hang out and listen on the ship, and I do kind of wish they'd done the whole thing there but I suppose I understand why they want to give people 'actual chairs' in which to 'sit normally'.

Some people do stay for the whole 25 hours; there's food for purchase in the museum (plus a free chowder at night and free pastries in the morning While Supplies Last) and the marathon is being broadcast throughout the whole place, so you really could just stay in the museum the entire time without leaving if you wanted. We were not so stalwart; we wanted good food and sleep not on the floor of a museum, and got both. The marathon is broken up into four-hour watches, and you get a little passport and a stamp for every one of the four-hour watches you're there for, so we told ourselves we would stay until just past midnight to get the 12-4 AM stamp and then sneak back before 8 AM to get the 4-8 AM stamp before the watch ticked over. When midnight came around I was very much falling asleep in my seat, and got ready to nudge everyone to leave, but then we all realized that the next chapter was ISHMAEL DESCRIBES BAD WHALE ART and we couldn't leave until he had in fact described all the bad whale art!

I'm not even the world's biggest Moby-Dick-head; I like the book but I've only actually read it the once. I had my knitting (I got a GREAT deal done on my knitting), and I loved getting to read a section, and I enjoyed all the different amateur readers, some rather bad and some very good. But what I enjoyed most of all was the experience of being surrounded by a thousand other people, each with their own obviously well-loved copy of Moby-Dick, each a different edition of Moby-Dick -- I've certainly never seen so many editions of Moby-Dick in one place -- rapturously following along. (In top-tier outfits, too. Forget Harajuku; if you want street fashion, the Moby-Dick marathon is the place to be. So many hand-knit Moby Dick-themed woolen garments!) It's a kind of communal high, like a convention or a concert -- and I like concerts, but my heart is with books, and it's hard to get of communal high off a book. Inherently a sort of solitary experience. But the Moby-Dick marathon managed it, and there is something really very spectacular in that.

Anyway, as much as we all like Moby-Dick, at some point on the road trip trip, we started talking about what book we personally would want to marathon read with Three Thousand People in a Relevant Location if we had the authority to command such a thing, and I'm pitching the question outward. My own choice was White's Once And Future King read in a ruined castle -- I suspect would not have the pull of Moby-Dick in these days but you never know!

boxofdelights posting in

wiscon

If you have an idea for a Wiscon panel -- even a half-baked idea -- you can propose it here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfvi7TCCIHg82rSpzrUKl8wX2SNMevlGP5HxOOnqa0pkrWu2w/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=106072416256127446722

Seriously, even if your idea is just "We have to talk about Heated Rivalry!" it's okay to propose that. The Panels team will take all the input we get, and work to shape it into a proposed schedule.

If you'd like to talk your idea over before you suggest it, you can use the comments to this post, or start a new post in this group, or start a new post in your own space and maybe also point your readers here?

jazzfish

JOE: We're gonna have to live with them eventually.
HARRY: Who?
JOE: The Protestants, Harry. The other half of the population.

Watching a film set in the Troubles on the eve of travel to Minneapolis and after doing some reading about Palestine may not have been the wisest course. Then again, maybe it was. No time like the present.

"The Boxer" is mostly about Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson's characters' relationship, but there's a lot of focus on Harry the IRA warlord and Joe the more political-minded IRA leader as well.

HARRY: And what are you offering, Joe?
JOE: Peace, Harry. Peace.
HARRY: Well, I'm sure you can deliver.

I'll be doing bus-stop watch for a couple of days, making sure kids can get home from school or seeing where they get taken if they don't. It's scary out here.