got_quiet

Much traveling is happening so I'm getting some leisure time. Sat down and read Taltos during a long flight. It felt a lot like a return to the pace and tone of the first book, which I enjoyed, but I think I liked Teckla better because it was pushing further in terms of what it was trying to think about. Taltos feels much more straightforward in comparison. The little bits of young Vlad were great, and the background on how he got in with Castle Black was a tidy little adventure.

I continue to enjoy the tone of the books, which are sort of equal parts nonchalance about very serious matters, and boiling rage over what is effectively racial injustice. The later part in particular I think is better done than most approaches to fantasy racism, which is usually lacking nuance and addressed from the perspective of the perpetrator. The issue of racism in Taltos isn't exactly meant to be a rumination on the very concept of racism or anything like that, but simply feels like realistic depiction of the effect that prejudice has on the way someone who has been victimized by it sees the world. Maybe I said something like this about the first book, but since this is an "origin story" in some sense it is particularly evident here.

I also had to drive cross country and had a total of over 24 hours of listening time to fill, so I queued up a whole bunch of episodes of Madame Magenta, which was recommended during the Snowflake Challenge. It was very entertaining and certainly kept me awake. The premise is a charlatan psychic who does still actually have the ability to commune with the spirits among other things is dictating a memoir that she wrote some years back. So there is the memoir story itself, and then there are her quips about it and her commenting about what she's reading with her husband, with a bonus cocktail of the day and letters from readers and so on. So far in the plot Magenta is being harassed by her dead ex-husband to retrieve some valuables he stole and donate them so he can get afterworld brownie points.

I'm not sure how to describe the humor. It's a little crass, a little maybe from the Monty Python tradition of absurdity, a little bit of Madame Magenta being very OTT. It's pretty British I guess, or maybe it's just supposed to be, I'm not British nor a Britaboo so I have no ear for it. A lot of focus is on ridiculous characters being silly. At the end there are also ads for a litany of other podcasts in the same network and they all sound so damn boring lol. But I am enjoying this one, and maybe will listen to more in my next long ass trip, which is 10 hours of train riding round trip in the next few days. In other words this has literally been a month of Trains, Planes, and Automobiles for me.

On that note I was around Denver recently and had a bit of time between engagements, so I stopped by a place called Wings over the Rockies. There's a main museum with a bunch of different vehicles, but I went to a little Annex, which didn't have many planes, but did have a bunch of flight training equipment that guests were allowed to try out. So I sat in a simulated cockpit and got to kind of fly a Cessna under the instruction of an older commercial pilot. According to him I did a great job landing but was not used to the foot breaks, which are just like articulated parts of what are otherwise steering pedals, and veered right into the grass at the very end. So I would probably not kill absolutely everyone if forced to land a plane, but maybe, like, a lot of people one one side. I'll do better next time.

I have almost finished the last round of candy. This was less of an interesting batch because I picked up a lot of hard candies. Some were fruity, fizzy, had shreds of coconut inside (that one was kind of interesting) but there were generally no big surprises. Oh, one was just straight up a cough drop lol. It's got "eucalyptus menthol" on the wrapper and is green with a cross and when I popped it into my mouth I was like, this is just a cough drop. I would eat cough drops like candy if I didn't have minor concerns that this might not be good for me so I'm not complaining.

Anyway this post is not really about the candy. Today was independent book store day, and because I was soo good about not buying books last year (this is a lie) I decided to treat myself and got a big ass pile today. There was a book store crawl in the city and my roommate and I hit up 10 of the 30 stops. The crowds were large, a good sign for humanity maybe. I picked up about 7 inches worth of books, which is how books should be counted when you are struggling to fit more into your room. Here's a picture of the haul, but for text's sake, I got:

Brust - Taltos. For some reason none of the shops had any other and it does seem to be next on the list so I guess I'm reading things in publication order.

Hammett - the Maltese Falcon. I've started reading this one. I know the misogyny is baked into the genre but after being saturated in modern queer fiction for so long when it first hit my brow furrowed. The main reason I got it was to see how close the plot hewed to a Jayvik Maltese Falcon AU lol.

Sartre - The Age of Reason. Definitely most likely of the bunch for me to never get to.

Wodehouse - Carry on, Jeeves. I've never read a Jeeves so figured why not.

Zelensky - A Message from Ukraine. This was done as part of a fundraiser, but it's a remainder, so I don't think the fund got any money from it. It's connected to https://u24.gov.ua/ so I will donate there too.

Murata - Life Ceremony. Last weekend a friend handed me his copy of The New Yorker with a feature on Murata, who I haven't heard of before. Then today was the first time I've been in a shop for new books in a very long time and a few of her books were front and center, so I guess she's having a moment.

Wormwood Journal. It's a journal of historical fantasy and weird fiction. I'm more into fantasy and this is more into weird fiction, but this issue seems to deal mostly with fairy lore.

Winspear - Maisie Dobbs. Picked up because it looked like a palate cleanser after the Maltese Falcon.

Freedman - Strategy. Contributes 2 of the 7 inches of the stack. But I like these sorts of thematic history books. I think.

I haven't finished a single book this year, although I've started a handful, so maybe one of these will break the drought.

Since I am avoiding a deadline at the moment I spent all night making up a random list of 100 items of formative media modeled after

queenlua 's list of 100 books. I started out with books, but hitting 100 titles that really had a notable impact on me was impossible, largely because my memory is not strong enough for me to recall enough of them and also because I read a lot of schlock that doesn't linger. So instead it's Books, Movies, TV, and Games (and 3 bands).

This list is here. Looking it over it's a whacky mix of stuff that grabbed me at an early age but never would have otherwise made a dent (most of the movies) or stuff that really changed my brain one way or another. There are a few books on there that suck ass but my reading them still resulted in a permanent change in brain chemistry, so they stand with the rest. I also tried to stick to a single instance within a group. So, not every Ghibli film, not every Blizzard game, etc., just representative or particularly notable titles.

If you decide to join me in wasting some time let me know how many you matched with and if there's stuff you have strong opinions about or find intriguing.

I'm sure when I wake up tomorrow I'm going to think, "Why is X not on the list?!"

ETA:

I did in fact realize there were two things that absolutely should have been on the list.

The first is Anne Fausto-Sterling's Myths of Gender, which had a massive effect on my understanding of society's understanding of gender. The other is Language in Thought and Action by Hayakawa, which first got me into linguistics and probably turned me into a total sophomoric ass sometimes re. semantics.

RL stuff has been going on. I'm feeling better which is great, but also received critical psychic damage from the election which is not great. Been doing a lot of escapism lately as a result, so below is some stuff I've been reading, watching, and playing.

Red, White, and Royal Blue

( Read more... )

Arcane, Season 2

( Read more... )

Detroit: Become Human

( Read more... )

I've been ill these last couple of weeks in that sort of way where I'm miserable and can't get anything done but sure all hell am not going to bother going to the doctor. There was never any follow up with that online checkup by the way. I was waiting for someone to call so I could get my flu shots, since that was part of the survey, and nope. So I gave up on them and got a vaccination elsewhere today.

A consequence of my feeling terrible was my brain short circuited and things got so silly that I ended up having to go back into the grocery store three times in a row because I couldn't remember this or that thing, including groceries that I had left at the cashier's. And then I forgot to put the lunch meat away when I got home and it didn't occur to me until the next day that this had happened, and sure enough it was sitting in a bag that morning, so I had to go buy new lunch meat because I was already feeling like crap and didn't want to risk further deterioration of my gut health. I've been feeling better now but the last few weeks have been a bit of a wild ride.

( Some stuff I've been watching and reading )

Also sort of kinda started playing this idle game on youtube of all places. Most of the playables suck, but there's this little game that's sort of similar to Neko Atsume. You can be a crazy cat dad with a husband and just fill your house with cats and do some bad interior decoration, and since you get your currency by just checking in once in a while I log in once at night, clip my cats nails, make my husband some lunch and that's it. It's called adorable home.

The bedroom scene in Adorable Home. Sometimes you're sleeping with your husband and one of your dozen cats is up to no good.

Medical care in this country is so broken. I got some email telling me it's time for a checkup, and I can do it this hybrid way where I fill out an internet survey first and then there's followup by a person. It warns you that this costs money, but it said that it took my insurance, so I figured ok, I guess this is a thing I should do.

They make you fill out this form which is like, how old are you, how much do you weigh, do you remember your last blood pressure check, do you need a HIV test, etc. All absolutely basic stuff. And at the end it's like, thanks, that'll be 350 fucking dollars lol. 350 entire bucks to tell a survey I don't get enough exercise. Now, I do have insurance, but it does not tell you if your insurance actually covers this bullshit and it doesn't give you the cost of the service until the very end, so it's not like anyone can make an informed decision on whether or not it's worth it to roll the dice. And I think my insurance does cover the service but when I saw that number I still became murderous with rage. This country is so broken. And this isn't even for the fucking follow up, in which someone actually has to do something. Fuck this shit.

*

Anyway, I finished reading Teckla. Spoilers below, but it's an old book so...

( Spoilery Review )

*

In HSR news, I am fuming that there's not a single male 5-star in this rotation. I want to roll for Moze, but there is no pity for 4 stars and I don't want to waste my jade on the ladies. As much as I like them, as a F2P I can't afford them if I want to go all in for when the guys pop up. So I used my free 10-pull of Feixiao and just got Asta. *weep*

I am however enjoying this patch's side story. The Belabogians are still my favorite cast (yes, more than Penacony) and Luka was in my roster for a long time. HSR's writing also feels much stronger with their smaller, encapsulated storylines. I haven't finished the tournament, but I figure I'll get there in a couple of more days. And then it's time to see how bad the Apocalyptic Shadow is.

*

I've been trying to write a few fic for the Fandom Gift Basket, but it's just not happening. I can't get my brain to discard all the other shit I have going on and focus. And I'm not finding any good hooks to get my dumbass brain zoned in. I was able to write 2 gifts for the last one so I feel bummed that I'm not doing my part better this time. I'll keep on trying I guess. (Also I know some people hate it when people complain about their own writing, in which case, fair warning, that's all I fucking do when I talk about writing. It's suffering.)

As I was trying to get something down tonight I was thinking about my life back in high school, when I was writing thousands of words every day, simply due to the fact that my school was trash, I was bored to the point of mental break for 8 hours a day, and all I had to keep myself from screaming in frustration was a pen and a notebook. I don't miss those days, because again, school bored me so much that I swear to god it legitimately traumatized me, but boy does being trapped in a 0 stimulus environment for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, provide an opportunity for a certain degree of creativity. Now whenever I sit down all I can think about is the 100s of things that I need to get done, and the consequences of not doing them is no longer a 0 and a teacher saying they are concerned I'm not living up to my potential, lol.

Current Mood: frustrated

Read Reborn by Seth Haddon over this weekend. It was alright. Big plus was it was adult fantasy. I think I liked Reforged better though. The story in this one was ok enough. It felt a little directionless in many parts, which seems to be a big pitfall for stories that involve exile or fugitives, but despite a lot of rushing back and forth I liked all the characters and there was still a decent sense of scale. Distances felt distant enough, communication across countries felt appropriately difficult. And I like the worldbuilding in this series. There are cultural clashes and interesting religious practices etc. Reborn does the same thing Reforged does where it dumps so much fantasy jargon at me in the first few chapters I don’t know if anything will ever make sense, but things settle down quickly enough and it’s all perfectly followable in the end.

( More Reborn stuff )

In the time that I haven't been reading I've just been grinding LEZ, which was predicted. I used to play a ton of stepmania when I was younger, and had some tracks that I adored. They were all lost in one of my many computer moves in the following years, which is a shame because I can't remember what any of the tracks were called. But I'm very out of practice with this sort of thing, and haven't played any music in general many years, so my sense of timing really needs to be retrained. On top of that unlike stepmania LEZ doesn't give any visuals for off beat notes, so it's not as easy to eye the spacing in some points. The sort of music that people seem to like to use as tracks nowadays is also highly syncopated, so it's been a challenge, but playing just raw hit the button at the right time rhythm games does something good for my emotional state for some reason. I just like to grind them.

Playing LEZ did make me nostalgic for stepmania, so I went poking around to see if it was still available. It seems like it technically is. The last update was in 2023. But the forums are completely dead. The last community post was like 4 years ago. So likely most of the great tracks that I used to play are lost to the decay of the internet. That's a real shame.

One of my mutuals on HSR sent me a message for the first time since I started playing, and it was to gush about my Aventurine lol. He is a pretty boy, and also very stronk at E1S1. When his rerun comes around I may just try to get another Eidolon for him, because he's by far my strongest unit. I also got Gepard and Welt back to back just with raw standard tickets, which means I have all of the standard banner's men now! I still don't have Bronya or Himeko, and I don't know if I want to use my 300th free pick for them. On the one hand, that would probably be the meta play to get Bronya. On the other hand, men.

Yesterday I finally got around to weeding my books, and got four bankers boxes worth of them out. That's a lot of books, but they were all things that I'd picked up for cheap and said I wanted to read some day ages ago, and I never picked them up or opened them. I still have a lot of those still hanging around, but I tried to be as aggressive as possible with just getting rid of things and being honest to myself about if I'd actually read them. Doing this kicked up a ton of dust so now breathing in my room is going to suck for a little bit. Clearly I need to do more cleaning of the shelves or something. The work was sorely needed to be done, because I was picking my way through piles and piles of books and it was all cramping my style a bit too much. Back when I was moving often this sort of cull was enforced by having to fit all my stuff into a car, but since I've settled the problem has gotten a little out of control. I'm hoping that pick out another two boxes worth, and then there will be some room to breathe! Even with all the culling I did, there are two shelves double shelved of "to read" books still looking at me accusingly.

Jeeze oh man. The crazy season for work is basically over, though, it is not as over as it's usually over due to certain Life Choices. But right on the tail end of it all I managed to pick up COVID and kind of got knocked on my ass for a while, and it's taking me longer than I would like to not just get healthy again, which is kind of sorta done, but also to reset mentally and start clawing back the good habits that I was trying to cultivate before I spent more than a weak barely eating and sleeping all day long. My bedtime is fucked up again, my attention span is low again, my fridge is empty again, I'm just a mess!

So this blog post is sort of an attempt to reset and reassess a little bit. It's not really a half year mark thing, but regardless here are how things have been going.

I did pretty good about eating more vegetarian meals during the first few months of the year. So the last couple of months I've only had a few days that were fully vegetarian. I'll try to get back on the horse but the whole, constantly on the edge of malnutrition thing is a problem.

I have resisted a lot of books that I would have otherwise bought due to the book purchasing moratorium, but I haven't been perfect. I think maybe 5 or six books have snuck into the house even though they should not have lol.

My reading also has not been at a particularly high rate. I recently got through half of Steven Brust's Teckla, and I'm enjoying that book a lot. I think it's a bit of a brave premise. The first couple of books were about being a crime lord and an assassin, and this book is like, "you know, that's maybe not the most spiritually healthy thing to be." The book is not wrong about that lol, but I typically don't expect a fantasy paperback to be willing to interrogate itself like that. I'm curious to see how this one ends.

I also read Woodland Stranger by Jane Buehler. It was unfortunately not good. It wasn't terrible, but just in the mediocre Original Works M/M category. The prose was very stark. Some parts were ok that way, some were way too dry and full of telling. The characters felt kind of shallow as a result. And the plot was frustrating, because it kind of wanted to be an adventure fantasy that dealt with a couple difficult subjects, like war and loss of family and possibly even toxic army culture? But it also realllly wanted to be safe and comfy at the same time, and it was like reading through a moral gauze. I read the book as part of a review program, which is always a little awkward because I want to support authors and see them succeed, but also believe very strongly that reviews are for readers, not authors, so with this program I often find myself trying to be frankly critical without sounding too mean. Sometimes that feels like a hard thing to do.

The one thing I did manage to achieve while sick and laid up was get Chronos on farm in Hades II. I have seen the matrix, his patterns are nothing to me now, and/or I just managed to build my arcana deck up enough and have a better grasp of weapon loadouts to start the fight at a much better advantage lol.

My goal for the near future is to write a couple small things for

fandomgiftbasket. I thought I'd have more time to do this but COVID obliterated my energy for everything.

And after that I want to finally. FINALLLYYYYY finish all the BLM VNs. I'm so close goddamnit.

I am very backlogged on posts I meant to make but now it feels like to time to make them has passed. I did just finish a book though so here's what I thought of that at least.

Charmed and Dangerous is an anthology of m/m fantasy. I picked it up because I was looking up books by Ginn Hale, and this one listed her as one of the contributors. Tl;dr is it's good. The stories are urban fantasy types, for the most part, and aside from a couple stories I liked them all. Decent variety of plots and pairings within the relatively narrow genre of m/m fantasy romance. For a more thorough review:

( Read more... )

I haven't been reading as much this year as last. My concentration has been hard to wrangle for a while. And it was not particularly well wrangled before. But I did finish a decent Sci-Fi book recently.

( Some book, show, and music reviews )

Eugh god.

Jet lag is such a pain in the ass. The worst part about it (I might be repeating myself here but I am sooo jet lagged I don't care) is when I come back it takes forever to recover because I've got nothing going on at home and can just pass out at 5PM every day after work. So it's been a while since I came back from my last trip to Japan and I'm still fighting off sleep during the sunlight hours so I don't wake up at midnight like I have the last few days. Even though I've been trying to stay up things are just not resetting.

Here's a review: Spending 18 hours in transit sucks ass.

But going to Japan is still worth it. This trip was part leisure and part business. It's very rare that I get to Japan twice in so short a time span. It will be a few years before I get the chance to go again. And this time I was solo for a large portion instead of hanging out with family, so since I didn't need to worry about anyone but myself on the leisure leg I went a liiiiiiittle bit wild on the merch. Compared to some people I'm sure I was still modest about it but since I don't buy too much stuff during regular times coming back with a pile of things this time felt like a major splurge. I ended up picking up some cheap kimono, and some tea supplies.

( Books I bought )

Current Mood: sleepy

Some spoilers below. TL;DR as a third book in a trilogy it was more of the same, which basically means it was good and fun though the plot was a little bit of a mess. I think it's a solid fantasy romance series, even if it's maybe not my favorite thing.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: relaxed

I've finished off the second book of this duology, and would say that ultimately I enjoyed it, and my quibbles are minor. While Kiram and Javier were the clear centerpieces there was a large cast across both books and all of the characters were interesting and felt individual, not yoked to the central pairing but with their own backstories, lives, motivations, etc.

The second book is almost exclusively set in Anacleto, which is Kiram's home town, so instead of him being a fish out of water among the Cadeleoneans at Sagrada, Javier is in a similar situation in the opposite direction. A lot of time is spent on what amounts to worldbuilding and scene setting. If the plot is broadly about Fedeles' curse and attempts to cure it, very little of the book is actually dedicated to that. It's more about Javier getting a taste of what it's like to be able to be openly gay, to acknowledge and own that part of himself fully, and about him deciding whether to turn his back on Cadeleonean society completely.

The existential problem in the book is sort of prepared against for sort of, but not really until maybe the last quarter of the book or even later does anyone suddenly need to do anything about it, and quickly. This makes the ending feel a little abrupt, but a lot of the major, frantic decisions that happened in the end did have their foundations set in previous scenes. The culprit was of course as expected. I don't think Hale was trying to be sneaky about it. My only real gripe, which is maybe a minor one, is that Kiram discovers what's really going on basically by someone sending him a letter laying it all out.

A mystery book this is not. It's much stronger in its characters and worldbuilding, which does has some cliches. It plays a bit with the "nasty kinda Christian repressed culture sucks and is wrong" the "open, spiritual, gay accepting culture is right" trope, but manages to avoid being too cartoonish about it by showing bad politics and restrictive social mores on the Hadiim side, and it humanized the Cadeleonian side in the previous book.

The story is still told in Kiram's POV, and there's a lot about him learning to assert himself within his family too. Of the other characters in the first book only really Elezar and Nestor get any page time. Elezar, poor guy, ends up with his heart crushed but manages to remain loyal, and now that I know the next set of books is focused on him I'm definitely picking them up. I am an absolute sucker for the pining types. It's also a lot hornier than the previous book. The breakup at the end doesn't last very long at all. And in the safety of the Haldiim district Kiram and Javier go a little wild.

That makes two for two in titles I've enjoyed from Ginn Hale. I think we have similar taste in plot/romance ratio, in cast sizes, in quantities of blood spilled (a lot) and in general tone, so maybe I will start seeking out the rest of her stuff.

Current Mood: relaxed

More reading! I'm doing so much reading! It's great!

Deosil

( Read more... )

Lord of the White Hell
( Read more... )

Current Mood: chipper

Been reading a good chunk of books lately, much to my own surprise honestly, so here's a bunch of fast reviews.

The Hex series.

( Read more... )

Prince of Air and Darkness

( Read more... )

Spellbound

( Read more... )

The Flaw in All Magic

( Read more... )

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So that's the most recent dump of books read. I'm thinking I need to make myself a nice bookish icon now that I'm back on the wagon with the written word.

Work has been wrecking me lately. I've started studying tea again but I barely have any time for classes. My goal is to get the damn fukusa folded correctly and consistently all the time and just to remember the order of operations for the ryakubon temae without my teacher needing to prompt me. Years ago I had this all fully memorized, but my memory is a sieve so now with the passage of time I need to basically start from 0. I haven't had much time or space to practice at home. It's one of those things where if feel like in order to do Z, I need to get Y done, but to do that I need to do X and then I get tired just thinking about it. But luckily a lot of my busy work obligations are now pretty much done for the year so I'm not putting in so much overtime and my evenings are more free.

Even though I've been kind of feeling pressed for time, I did check Libby a bit ago to see if any of the Whyborne and Griffin books had become newly available, and they had! So I abandoned all responsibilities and read Bloodlines, Hoarfrost, Maelstrom, Fallow and Drackenwood all in very quick succession, to the point where trying to remember what happened in which book is actually mildly difficult. My understanding is that there are two more main books that I haven't gotten to, and unfortunately Libby still doesn't have any of the shorts besides carousel so I'm missing those still.

( Whyborne and Griffin Spoilers Inside )

I just finished reading Midnight Riot a couple days ago. It's a brisk and humorous little police caper where our hero, a fresh newbie on the London police force, happens to tumble into the supernatural crimes unit (population 1, well, 2 now) after interviewing a ghost as a witness to a gruesome murder. The book is part chasing down the culprit in a series of spontaneous and brutal crimes, learning to negotiate fantasy politics between the spirits of the Thames, learning about magic, and feeling respectfully horny towards the women in his life. There's also a good deal of wry humor, particularly in the way Peter describes the world around him and the odd predicaments he finds himself in. I would say the good-natured tone of the book, and the fun narration carry the plot, which is fine and interesting, but maybe not robust enough to feel like a really good detective novel.

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I finished watching the three part Overwatch shorts and am unimpressed. There wasn't anything there in terms of narrative oomph, and the lore introduced is just begging to be picked apart. Why was Liao only able to make one intelligence, and why'd it have to die to spread consciousness to all the omnics? It's just makes no sense out side of handwavy magic-tech convenience. The general lameness of the writing was to be expected, as it was on par with pretty much everything else that's come out for Overwatch, though I still feel compelled to keep half an eye on it. I still haven't read the Reaper short story to completion, nor the one for Baptiste though, cause I just feel sad about them. I read the Orisa book a while back and felt that a children's book like that was as sophisticated as the writers could get.

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The one thing I'm following that had an update I did enjoy was Nu:Carnival lol. The last event was for summer, and had a nice long story plus included a rhythm game. The game is not particularly well optimized so I have ignore the music to get the timings right but I still enjoyed it. It's also sort of lucky that I don't pull for Edmond, Dante, or Kuya, so I got a big chunk of time to start stocking up contracts for the next event.

Current Mood: listless

It's been a busy few weeks for me so here's a random dump of what I've been reading and watching and never had a chance to post as I was reading and watching it.

( Read more... )

I signed up to

fandomgiftbasket with a handful of fandoms, and included a non-fandom request in the (probably high?) likelihood that no one cares about what I care about. I kind of hemmed and hawed about that one because while I will certainly be happy to get some music recs I also feel like if I request something non-fandom that's definitely what I'm going to get. I'm going through all the baskets as they get posted and looking for anything that I can fill, and there are a few possible hits, but it's so hard for me to write without being driven by some sort of mania, which is why I don't do exchanges! Even the baskets that share canons don't seem to fit quite well into what I like. In particular I noticed that I said that bad ends and tragedy was great and that's like a DNW for 50% of the signups lol. I just like suffering, okay?

I haven't been able to keep up completely with my Libby hold habit. A few books I had to just let go without starting them, including one about modern sea piracy that I did want to read, so I've stuck myself back on the queue.

I'm currently mid read on two different books, and I'm not enjoying either of them. But I'm not enjoying them in a way where instead of just being bored and stopping I'm getting aggravated and the reaction is driving me forward as some sort of psychic self-harm. They're starting to turn a little into hate reads.

The first book I'm trying to get through is Babel by R. F. Kuang. The premise is that the industrial revolution is driven by a magic involving linguistics and silver. And the blurb says the main character gets to take a stand against imperialism.

It's just so... ugh. I had picked it up and put it down a dozen times in bookshops because worldbuilding that engages with language is right up my alley, but the blurb always made me suspicious and I would put it back. A little while ago it was sitting on a display at the library so I thought, well, no risk there and I borrowed it. But it is turning out to be the sort of hamfisted lecture that I was worried it might be. And so far the worldbuilding has been disappointing. I'm not super far in, only to chapter 4, but I can only continue by making note after note of complaint after what feels like every other paragraph. I am hoping that eventually an interesting character will show up, or something interesting will happen, but so far no dice.

I wanted to hold off on specific gripes for after I was done with the whole thing but just starting to write about this book has now gotten me into sporking gear so here are a couple things I noted so far. They are by far not the only details I took issue with, but they're bits where I was like... huh? And they're kind of nitpicky details that I wouldn't have spent much thought on if they didn't sort of demonstrate what feels like a broader problem with the book so far, which is that no one seems to behave with a consistent logic beyond trying to make some sort of very basic point about how colonialism and racism are bad mmkay.

So a few examples of moments that annoyed me:

( Dumb stuff. )

Overall, my mood as I read this book has so far largely been, "Why?!" We'll see if that is the mood that continues.

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The second book I'm sort of regretting starting is One For My Enemy. This got recced by the Librarything algorithm. It was sort of a NY crime family fantasy drawn from Slavic myth. Seemed appealing as a blurb.

My big problem with this book -- and again I haven't gotten that far -- is that I forgot how much I fucking hate het romances about 90% of the time. Just cannot bear the het cliches. The girl acting all "I can handle myself!" and the guy agreeing but insisting on babying her anyway, the weird borderline negging dialog that's meant to be banter, the dude jumping in to stop sexual harassment resulting in love at first sight. I hate it all. I'm kind of hoping that now that I've gotten past that setup the rest of the book will play out ok but honestly I doubt it. My man walked a drunk chick to the subway for a block and now he's like, "oh she's lovely and spirited and razor sharp and mean!" Ahhh I'm making myself annoyed all over again. I'm sure this aversion is the result of how fucking annoying it is for a guy to tell you all about yourself and get half it of wrong after having known you for 5 minutes but regardless of why I hate it I do.

The writing style also hits on one of my most massive pet peeves, which is aversion to the word "said" and the use of inappropriate verbs as replacement. A quote verb has to take the quote as its object. I know there is a drift away from that and some verbs have become commonplace exceptions but I still can't stand it when people "assure, 'I will do it.'" or "determine, 'Fine.'" You can't determine a "fine." You can be determined. You can say determinedly, but you cannot determine a word. This has been happening every other page and is honestly more annoying than the het.

But I'm also very early on in this book, so I'm going to keep going at least a little more and see if it gets better.

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got_quiet

January 2026

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Entries tagged with books

Leisure on the road

Book Haul

100 Things List

Shuffling towards the end of the year

Mostly about Suits!

Teckla

Reborn and some gaming

Book Cull

(no subject)

Charmed and Dangerous

Stuff I've been consuming

Japan Again!

A Power Unbound

Lord of the White Hell Part 2

Books!

Some more M/M Fiction and one not

More Whyborne and Griffin

Midnight Riot

A Restless Truth, mostly.

Two hate reads at a time?

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January 2026

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