lightreads

Natural Twenty by Charlie Novak

I’m deep deep deep in actual play fandom these days, so I broke my rule about not ever picking up a romance novel without a rec for it because this one is supposed to be about a queer romance at D&D group. There is D&D in it, I suppose, but it’s the lightest of set dressing at least by the 1/3 mark when I got bored. This is competently written about the bookshop owner and the flower shop owner, but they had such a notable lack of chemistry that it’s nearly impressive. Not so much as the tiniest spark.

Rats and Gargoyles by Mary Gentle

Late 80’s/early 90’s fantasy about the city where enslaved humans rise up beneath overseer rat people and the creepy gargoyle gods. Intricate and occasionally intriguing, but we were spending way too much time with the nineteen-year-old disguised king’s son (he thought for sure everyone would treat him the same because his superiority is just so apparent) and what his penis thinks about everything. His penis does the vast majority of his thinking. The author is clearly aware of what she’s doing with him, but there’s something about the preoccupation with his sexual fantasies that I don’t have patience for, even if his arc is presumably going to be, you know, growing the hell up.

The Praxis by Walter Jon Williams

This is my third try at WJW. I normally don’t give so many chances, but the problem here is that he’s actually a good writer on a craft level, and he’s interested in giving character development all the time it needs, and I like his ideas. And yet. I viscerally dislike his books, including this one about the civil war over control that erupts after the alien overlords die out, and races held stagnant for thousands of years have to learn to be creative thinkers again. Great idea, right? I don’t know, I hated it. It's not even just the terrible, terrible writing about women (though, Walter. Walter. My dude. Please stop using the word “lush” to describe your protagonist every other page, that word is gross to me now). I mean that certainly doesn’t help. And neither does the thing where we’re told it’s normal for women to join the military, and yet to judge by this book (and I read a lot of it) she is the only one in the entire service. All other women portrayed are concerned only with men and what men want and what men can do for them, by the way. It’s not even that. I just do not like his books. Someone stop me before I try again.

On the Edge of Gone by Corin Duyvis

A good book that I just can’t with. YA about an autistic teen and her mother who do not have a ride off of dying apocalyptic earth, except for reasons they end up tangled with a ship about to depart. I trust this author to be interesting and nuanced and great on disability, but this particular book jumped up and down on a not fun button I didn’t even know I had, so I noped out.

The Foxhole Court

So like there is this made up sport, right, and our protagonist is recruited to play for a college team. Except the college team is all delinquents and addicts. That could be a book, but actually this one is about how the protagonist is running from the mob and specifically his father because he saw a murder, and something something the sport was actually invented by his family, and there's this guy on his team who also saw the murder but who can't recognize him, and also there's a queer love interest, but at the point where I failed out of this book (around 1/3) the love interest was 100% asshole and 0% sexy. I failed out, incidentally, because everyone in this book seems to be an asshole. There is a lot going on here, guys, and most of it is extremely that thing where you wish the author would stop showing you her id so aggressively because even when you are into some of the things she is into, it's like, my dude, no, we are not that good of friends, put that away.

A Beginning at the End

A book about a post pandemic world released in early 2020. He really could have made a career out of that accidental timing, but I doubt it's gonna happen with this book, which is about various people either being or hiding from terrible parents in the backdrop of a society which has lost billions and is just barely holding it together. I liked some parts of the world building, but the actual plot was frustrating and unenjoyable, and I just can't make myself read the last quarter since I care about literally no one, down to the cute kid.

This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers

Serviceable Breakfast Club but where the kids are hiding in the high school from zombies. Nothing wrong with the first quarter, but I'm not interested in how bad these teenagers are at being people under stress. You've got your classic dude-sublimating-his-grief-by-shouting-a-lot-and-being-unpleasant and just, meh, no thanks.

Content notes: Child abuse. Suicidal ideation.

Lent by Jo Walton

I read ¾ of this and just can't be bothered. It is more than competent, I just do not give a damn about Italian religious history, and I've read much more engaging versions of what if this old religious belief was literally and specifically true. Also, way to surgically remove every iota of the numinous, you know? I've said before that I think specfic books about religion where the theology is literally and observably and indisputably true and adherent to understood mechanical laws take the emotional heft out of faith. I think that the same can be said of certain kinds of magic. You have to have that emotional risk, that bit of free fall when you don't know if the god or the magic will catch you, but you're jumping anyway. If you don't have that, you've just got a whole lot of complicated rules about how god/magic works, and that's boring.

Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer by Barbara Ehrenreich

I am the target audience for thoughtful books on the intersection of medicine and wellness-mania (AKA ableism under a different name). And this one started out well with a discussion of over-testing, because there really are medical tests that will show positive most of the time and yet mean nothing and result in no meaningful change in behavior. But you could have heard the record scratch from space when, in chapter 1, she was all "so I had breast cancer and I was traumatized, and then I was retraumatized by an ambiguous follow up mammogram that turned out to be nothing, so I decided to stop getting mammograms because clearly they are not necessary, and I'm using a throwaway comment by a random doctor to justify it." Wow. What even. I am saying this as the partner of a cancer survivor – you can make a case for the over-scanning of healthy people (and there are specifically lingering questions over whether we are over-mammogramming people in their 30's) but a cancer survivor is in a different cohort and trauma responses are not a good way to frame thoughtful books.

The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan

Yeah, IDK, sometimes you just take against a book before you're even far enough into it to know why. This is a post climate apocalypse book where most land mass is gone (or that's my guess based on the bit I read). But I am just so over post apocalypse traveling circuses and their *gestures* everything. I can't think of another book featuring one at the moment and yet: I am over it.

Lady Sophia's Lover by Lisa Kleypas

Very old school historical het romance. Couldn't hack the thing where he wants to "master her" and she likes him infantilizing her, and that's not kink or anything, that's just how men and women are. It's very porny, though, if that's of interest. Like, hello, boner in sentence one.

The Gone World

DNF. I liked this in principle – amputee lady NCIS officer travels through branching future times to solve a murder, also there's a looming alien apocalypse that keeps shifting closer up the timeline. Should be great! Actually just a lot of thriller tropes stitched together with horrific violence and alas, the loneliness of the cowboy time traveler, and I just wasn't in the mood.

To the Left of Inspiration

DNF. I wouldn't have picked this up if I'd known it was a 'justify my disabled existence to the normals' book as opposed to an actual disability memoir. But it is, and I am allergic to such books these days. Not to mention this one is quite dull. It could be interesting – she has a doctorate in psychology and is an avid traveler and reader – but this book works so hard to make her life sound ordinary, guide dog and all, that it comes off as boring.

Also, on a separate note, calling your book "humorous" in the introduction is really not a thing I recommend doing. Basically ever. If you tell people it's funny, it is less funny, this is a rule of the universe.

Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Good book, wrong time. This is a haunting and strange tale of a girl who is the designated ghost-catcher in a possibly post-apocalypse world. The writing is strong, but. The protagonist is the subject of such unrelenting awfulness. I counted, and I was at the 22% mark before anyone said something to her that wasn't actively cruel, and even that was complicated more than kind. I imagine that improves, but. Not right now.

We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia

Oh man, this could have been so great. Secondary world where powerful men enter into triad marriages with two women, one to have the babies, one to be his political partner. You know, the pretty one and the smart one. But in this book, the two women – enemies from finishing school – fall in love with each other. Also there is a revolution and blackmail and spying and immigration politics and stuff. And yet I am abandoning it. The whole thing is subliminally annoying like a constant high-pitched noise. Which, come to think of it, also describes the pitch of tension and emotion, which is perpetually at, like, 13/10. Exhausting, and not very effective.

A few more abandoned books.

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Unusual setting for a fantasy novel (I don't think I'd read any set in an actual arab country before, though I've read several since trying this) but I realized I was reading entirely for the setting and wincing my way through putting up with the characters. So much teenaged shouting and pouting, it might as well have been anime. Meh.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich

So this is actually really compelling. It's a bunch of oral histories of life before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. There are stark contrasts here – there are the people who loved the union and whose lives and identities were shattered by its collapse. The profundity of the wound they suffered is extraordinary to read about; they didn't lose a nation, they lost an entire way of being. And then there are the others whose experience of the union was one of violence and terrible deprivation. Their memories are even more complicated. So basically, no one has a happy story to tell here. Content notes for antisemitism, death, torture, mass killing, etc. So yeah, this is a truly compelling book, but I lost my place somewhere in the middle – smack dab in a recollection of a mass execution – and I think I'm good.

Crossroads of Canopy

DNF. A fantasy about a treetop society and something something gods and goddesses that get reborn. But I developed a violent dislike for the protagonist and noped out. She's definitely got her reasons, but she's a completely intolerable person for the first 20% of the book, and life's too short, even if I imagine the arc is towards growing up. Hopefully growing up a lot. Also, it's not entirely her fault – I was not in a place this week where I could read about parents being sickeningly horrible in the ways hers were, so.

DNF.

I've been thinking I would do one of those things where you read only women and genderqueer writers for a year (details still fuzzy). And I figured before I did that, I'd run through some of the male writers I've had on TBR for years.

Yeeeeeah. That's . . . convincing me that doing without men for a year is a fantastic idea.

I gave this classic epic fantasy four hundred pages. It's – you know the thing where you read so much work that is responding to the earnest, straight-up original that you forget the earnest, straight-up original actually exists? And then you read it and you're like whoa, what the fuck?

This is thousands of pages of epic fantasy about the pubescent kitchen boy in a castle becoming apprenticed to a wizard doctor and getting caught up in the magical fight for a disinherited prince and a kingdom overtaken by evil, and there are scary elves, and prophecies, and magic swords, and he's going to become a man, you guys. Oh yeah, and he has mysterious parentage. And it is all.so.earnest.

And I just. There aren't many women in those four hundred pages I read, not so's you'd notice. But there is a minute, obsessive interest in this pubescent boy, and I just.

I do not want to read thousands of earnest pages tracking the rate of descent of his testicles, you know? Like, there are so many better things I could be doing with my life.