Reading not-Wednesday 23/8
Aug. 23rd, 2025 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livOne advantage of my unexpected free month was that I started reading books again. Not a lot but 6 complete novels and a longfic in 6 weeks, which is more than I have for years. Let me catch up with some brief reviews:
Since term properly, properly finished on 6 July, I have read:
I enjoyed but didn't love Miller's The Song of Achilles; I found Circe to be strong in the same ways but much more exciting. It really hits the notes remarkably well of both a myth, about gods and monsters and heroes and epic scale, and a novel about a person who seems entirely real. Circe really wrestles head-on with the situation of a woman who is powerful and privileged and certainly capable of using her power for harm, but is still subject to the cruelty of men who can physically overpower her and have the backing of the whole of male-dominated society.
As such it is often really hard to read; I don't mind feminist takes on classical mythology that make the women the viewpoint characters, but Miller's Circe is something far more raw than that, it's a kind of extended wail of anger about how all of Western society mistreats women. It's also really gripping even when you kind of know the plot (because it's in the Odyssey and other foundational texts of said Western society.) It isn't about relentless grinding violence, either; the ending, with Circe's friendship with Penelope is really sweet, and there are plenty of other moments of happiness and success. Circe comes out a winner in a way that makes sense to her, even if she doesn't overturn all the terrible power structures she (and the other characters) are caught in. Definitely recommended if you're feeling strong.
Coconut Unlimited was a present from my brother Thuggish Poet an embarrassingly long time ago – he thought I might relate to the experience of being a minority in a private school. However, CU is so firmly a book about a boy in a boys' school that there was almost no point of connection! Shukla pulls off a pretty unusual feat, which is writing from the point of view of a teenage boy who doesn't really see girls / women as people, but without either glorifying gross teenage boy attitudes or inviting the reader to feel superior to the protagonist. Part of how he does this is framing the story as reminiscence, with three established and secure adults looking back on their teenage years. Honestly it's one of the best coming-of-age stories I've come across in a while. Amit and his friends do absolutely stupid things for reasons that totally make sense within their limited, teenage worldview, and they could be incredibly cringey, but Shukla keeps them sympathetic.
Another reason why I was very unlike Amit and his friends is race. I might have been almost the only Jewish kid in school but I'm white. And overt antisemitism in the 90s was much less socially acceptable than anti-Asian racism (though it did exist, and I think my brothers in an all-male environment like the one in the book suffered more of it than I did in a girls' school). Also, my parents are not first gen immigrants, so I didn't have any of the issues around having on some level "better" language and cultural knowledge than them. I was also never tempted by or anxious about having street cred or whether people saw me as white or not, the titular "coconut" thing just wasn't an issue for me. It was always obvious that Black American youth culture was not for me, but that's not because I was more enlightened than Amit, just plainly more white.
Basically I was hugely invested in the three friends and their journey to figuring out a way to be themselves, navigating their various cultures' expectations of them.
I askedjack for recs, and he offered Will Super Villains be on the final?, and I said, no, I need more words. I decided to try this graphic novel about a superhero academy, by an author whose prose I like, and it turned out I was right, graphic novels just don't have enough words for me. Possibly if I'd read the whole series at one go rather than just the first volume, I might have felt less unsatisfied? But I just didn't like it enough to want to seek out the rest.
It's fine. It takes a fairly clichéd story of a teen girl with extra-special amazing powers who for flimsy narrative reasons isn't accepted at her new school, but then saves the day. Not a bad example of that genre, Li's drawings and Novik's writing are definitely competent, I could tell the characters apart, the story is pacey. It's manga-style both in terms of the art and the book as a physical object that is somewhere between a periodical and a book, cheap paper, line drawings only, and I haven't read a lot of manga. The story fit very comfortably into standard western school story / superhero comic grooves. For me the most interesting part was the endnotes about how Novik and Li worked together to create the characters, but that's a lot to do with the fact that it was a few pages of whole paragraphs.
Everybody loves Some desperate glory, all my friends think it's awesome and it's swept all the awards. Now I've got round to reading SDG, I entirely concur, it really is that good. I massively loved it. It has great characterization, and great world-building and it's an exciting space adventure that also cares about the ethics of ~conquering new worlds~. And it does a really interesting job of tackling the narrative problem of characters going back in time to fix bad history. My only slight criticism is that I could see the first twist coming, but not at all the second one or any of the twists after that, it kept on pulling the rug from under my feet even when I was primed to expect it to have sudden reveals. It pulls off well something which is far too often done badly: what if a fascist was sympathetic and not just a monster? And it's just impeccable writing throughout.
I think I did Ancillary Mercy a disservice by reading it absolutely years after Ancillary Sword, and immediately after Some Desperate Glory. Leckie is good in much the same way Tesh is, incredibly original space opera with great characterization and nuanced ethical questions about (space) empires. The too long since I read AS and AJ problem was mitigated by the fact that Breq tends to infodump a lot about her experience of being a human who used to be a spaceship, and the complex political situation she's dealing with, so she kind of filled in the bits that I'd forgotten.
I particularly enjoyed how AM works with Lieutenant Tisarwat as a Mary Sue character, with plot-relevant violet eyes and precocious talents, and completely subverts that trope. And generally I really cared about every character, even the small side-plot ones. The ending felt satisfying in some ways, it sort of wraps up all the problems identified in AJ (and expanded in AS), the all-powerful aliens, the use of clones, and Anaander Mianaai herself. Maybe a bit too neat? But I'm partly disappointed because I didn't want everything to be resolved, I wanted to read more of Breq and her crew desperately battling and scheming to save the galaxy from imminent doom. But I think there's two more novels in the same 'verse, even if we're not getting more of one of the best SF heroes this century.
I was very interested in this classic detective novel in the really unusual setting of 19th century New Orleans. And in fact it really worked well for me as a detective novel and as a showcase for Hambly's in-depth period research. Sort of like the Heyer detective novels, except that a book set in the US pre-Emancipation with a Black main character is deeply about racism rather than glossing over racism. I couldn't guess whodunnit but then I never really can; aFMoC didn't feel like a puzzle novel anyway, I was very interested in getting to know the characters and their backgrounds and motivations, not really solving the murder. There is a certain amount of violence but it's not especially gory by the standards of detective novels, and thankfully it neither minimizes racism nor presents the suffering of enslaved people voyeuristically.
I was intrigued to see what sort of author would write a detective like Benjamin January, and learned to my slight suprise that Hambly is a white woman deeply embedded in SF fandom, well enough connected to have relied on Octavia Butler (!!!) as a sensitivity reader. I was interested in, and educated by, Hambly's author's note about the fine social distinctions between people with different Black ancestry in the period. What I appreciated most about aFMoC was that the stakes are genuinely high; obviously it's bad if someone gets away with murder in any context, but in this novel January is in real danger of being re-enslaved. Unlike Tesh, Hambly is of a generation who warn for historic racism, but not for rape and child abuse, and there's rather a lot of the latter, though it's off screen.
I don't know that I'll rush out to read all the rest of the Benjamin January novels, but I'm glad I did try this classic introduction of the character.
I utterly loved I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! It's a perfect, delightful exploration of the fantasy shared by many geeky women of a certain age of being Cordelia from Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor.lannamichaels always writes really strong Vorkosiverse fic, and very much captures both what is great about Bujold (including her voice, super impressive), and also her problems. And I just rolled around in ITiCN! It really does feel like getting a bit more of Bujold's early in the series writing, and the glimpses of the OC who gets to be Cordelia are glorious. And also it gives very justified criticism of all that's wrong with the books (slight spoilers for the remainder of the series), but in a subtle, not heavy-handed way. I stayed up til 3 am reading to the end (which I am usually pretty disciplined about avoiding) and I really wanted to spend more time with not!Cordelia.
It's rated G on AO3, which I'm sure is correct by Archive standards, but I would kind of hesitate to give it to an actual 12yo. There is some sexual detail, not very explicit but more than just fade-to-black, and it has about the same level of triggery stuff as the original: the plot depends on rape and torture and murder and and war and partner abuse, but these things are mostly in the background.
I don't know how well this would work if you don't know canon; I think you would probably get something out of a very solid 30K word isekai space opera but it does kind of assume familiarity with the source material. But if you are at all a fan of Shards of Honor you should definitely read the fic!
Up next: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson.
Since term properly, properly finished on 6 July, I have read:
- Circe by Madeline Miller 2018, Pub 2018 Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526612519
- Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla (c) Nikesh Shukla 2010, Pub 2010 Quartet, ISBN 978-0-7043-7204-7
- Will Super Villains be on the final? by Naomi Novik, illustrated by Yishan Li (c) Temeraire LLC 2011, Pub 2011 Del Rey, ISBN 978-0-345-51656-5
- Some desperate glory by Emily Tesh (c) Emily Tesh 2023, Pub 2023 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-51718-6
- Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (c) Ann Leckie 2015, Pub 2015 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-50242-7
- A free man of color by Barbara Hambly (c) Barbara Hambly 1997, Pub 1998 Bantam, ISBN 0-553-57526-0
- I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! by Lanna Michaels, 2025
I enjoyed but didn't love Miller's The Song of Achilles; I found Circe to be strong in the same ways but much more exciting. It really hits the notes remarkably well of both a myth, about gods and monsters and heroes and epic scale, and a novel about a person who seems entirely real. Circe really wrestles head-on with the situation of a woman who is powerful and privileged and certainly capable of using her power for harm, but is still subject to the cruelty of men who can physically overpower her and have the backing of the whole of male-dominated society.
As such it is often really hard to read; I don't mind feminist takes on classical mythology that make the women the viewpoint characters, but Miller's Circe is something far more raw than that, it's a kind of extended wail of anger about how all of Western society mistreats women. It's also really gripping even when you kind of know the plot (because it's in the Odyssey and other foundational texts of said Western society.) It isn't about relentless grinding violence, either; the ending, with Circe's friendship with Penelope is really sweet, and there are plenty of other moments of happiness and success. Circe comes out a winner in a way that makes sense to her, even if she doesn't overturn all the terrible power structures she (and the other characters) are caught in. Definitely recommended if you're feeling strong.
Coconut Unlimited was a present from my brother Thuggish Poet an embarrassingly long time ago – he thought I might relate to the experience of being a minority in a private school. However, CU is so firmly a book about a boy in a boys' school that there was almost no point of connection! Shukla pulls off a pretty unusual feat, which is writing from the point of view of a teenage boy who doesn't really see girls / women as people, but without either glorifying gross teenage boy attitudes or inviting the reader to feel superior to the protagonist. Part of how he does this is framing the story as reminiscence, with three established and secure adults looking back on their teenage years. Honestly it's one of the best coming-of-age stories I've come across in a while. Amit and his friends do absolutely stupid things for reasons that totally make sense within their limited, teenage worldview, and they could be incredibly cringey, but Shukla keeps them sympathetic.
Another reason why I was very unlike Amit and his friends is race. I might have been almost the only Jewish kid in school but I'm white. And overt antisemitism in the 90s was much less socially acceptable than anti-Asian racism (though it did exist, and I think my brothers in an all-male environment like the one in the book suffered more of it than I did in a girls' school). Also, my parents are not first gen immigrants, so I didn't have any of the issues around having on some level "better" language and cultural knowledge than them. I was also never tempted by or anxious about having street cred or whether people saw me as white or not, the titular "coconut" thing just wasn't an issue for me. It was always obvious that Black American youth culture was not for me, but that's not because I was more enlightened than Amit, just plainly more white.
Basically I was hugely invested in the three friends and their journey to figuring out a way to be themselves, navigating their various cultures' expectations of them.
I asked
jack for recs, and he offered Will Super Villains be on the final?, and I said, no, I need more words. I decided to try this graphic novel about a superhero academy, by an author whose prose I like, and it turned out I was right, graphic novels just don't have enough words for me. Possibly if I'd read the whole series at one go rather than just the first volume, I might have felt less unsatisfied? But I just didn't like it enough to want to seek out the rest.It's fine. It takes a fairly clichéd story of a teen girl with extra-special amazing powers who for flimsy narrative reasons isn't accepted at her new school, but then saves the day. Not a bad example of that genre, Li's drawings and Novik's writing are definitely competent, I could tell the characters apart, the story is pacey. It's manga-style both in terms of the art and the book as a physical object that is somewhere between a periodical and a book, cheap paper, line drawings only, and I haven't read a lot of manga. The story fit very comfortably into standard western school story / superhero comic grooves. For me the most interesting part was the endnotes about how Novik and Li worked together to create the characters, but that's a lot to do with the fact that it was a few pages of whole paragraphs.
Everybody loves Some desperate glory, all my friends think it's awesome and it's swept all the awards. Now I've got round to reading SDG, I entirely concur, it really is that good. I massively loved it. It has great characterization, and great world-building and it's an exciting space adventure that also cares about the ethics of ~conquering new worlds~. And it does a really interesting job of tackling the narrative problem of characters going back in time to fix bad history. My only slight criticism is that I could see the first twist coming, but not at all the second one or any of the twists after that, it kept on pulling the rug from under my feet even when I was primed to expect it to have sudden reveals. It pulls off well something which is far too often done badly: what if a fascist was sympathetic and not just a monster? And it's just impeccable writing throughout.
I think I did Ancillary Mercy a disservice by reading it absolutely years after Ancillary Sword, and immediately after Some Desperate Glory. Leckie is good in much the same way Tesh is, incredibly original space opera with great characterization and nuanced ethical questions about (space) empires. The too long since I read AS and AJ problem was mitigated by the fact that Breq tends to infodump a lot about her experience of being a human who used to be a spaceship, and the complex political situation she's dealing with, so she kind of filled in the bits that I'd forgotten.
I particularly enjoyed how AM works with Lieutenant Tisarwat as a Mary Sue character, with plot-relevant violet eyes and precocious talents, and completely subverts that trope. And generally I really cared about every character, even the small side-plot ones. The ending felt satisfying in some ways, it sort of wraps up all the problems identified in AJ (and expanded in AS), the all-powerful aliens, the use of clones, and Anaander Mianaai herself. Maybe a bit too neat? But I'm partly disappointed because I didn't want everything to be resolved, I wanted to read more of Breq and her crew desperately battling and scheming to save the galaxy from imminent doom. But I think there's two more novels in the same 'verse, even if we're not getting more of one of the best SF heroes this century.
I was very interested in this classic detective novel in the really unusual setting of 19th century New Orleans. And in fact it really worked well for me as a detective novel and as a showcase for Hambly's in-depth period research. Sort of like the Heyer detective novels, except that a book set in the US pre-Emancipation with a Black main character is deeply about racism rather than glossing over racism. I couldn't guess whodunnit but then I never really can; aFMoC didn't feel like a puzzle novel anyway, I was very interested in getting to know the characters and their backgrounds and motivations, not really solving the murder. There is a certain amount of violence but it's not especially gory by the standards of detective novels, and thankfully it neither minimizes racism nor presents the suffering of enslaved people voyeuristically.
I was intrigued to see what sort of author would write a detective like Benjamin January, and learned to my slight suprise that Hambly is a white woman deeply embedded in SF fandom, well enough connected to have relied on Octavia Butler (!!!) as a sensitivity reader. I was interested in, and educated by, Hambly's author's note about the fine social distinctions between people with different Black ancestry in the period. What I appreciated most about aFMoC was that the stakes are genuinely high; obviously it's bad if someone gets away with murder in any context, but in this novel January is in real danger of being re-enslaved. Unlike Tesh, Hambly is of a generation who warn for historic racism, but not for rape and child abuse, and there's rather a lot of the latter, though it's off screen.
I don't know that I'll rush out to read all the rest of the Benjamin January novels, but I'm glad I did try this classic introduction of the character.
I utterly loved I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! It's a perfect, delightful exploration of the fantasy shared by many geeky women of a certain age of being Cordelia from Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor.
lannamichaels always writes really strong Vorkosiverse fic, and very much captures both what is great about Bujold (including her voice, super impressive), and also her problems. And I just rolled around in ITiCN! It really does feel like getting a bit more of Bujold's early in the series writing, and the glimpses of the OC who gets to be Cordelia are glorious. And also it gives very justified criticism of all that's wrong with the books (slight spoilers for the remainder of the series), but in a subtle, not heavy-handed way. I stayed up til 3 am reading to the end (which I am usually pretty disciplined about avoiding) and I really wanted to spend more time with not!Cordelia. It's rated G on AO3, which I'm sure is correct by Archive standards, but I would kind of hesitate to give it to an actual 12yo. There is some sexual detail, not very explicit but more than just fade-to-black, and it has about the same level of triggery stuff as the original: the plot depends on rape and torture and murder and and war and partner abuse, but these things are mostly in the background.
I don't know how well this would work if you don't know canon; I think you would probably get something out of a very solid 30K word isekai space opera but it does kind of assume familiarity with the source material. But if you are at all a fan of Shards of Honor you should definitely read the fic!
Up next: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-24 02:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-24 09:54 pm (UTC)* Edit: though come to think of it, the most egregious example of its implementation I've heard about comes from the UK under IIRC Thatcher, so if true maybe not just the US.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-26 11:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-26 10:42 pm (UTC)You have me dead to rights, lol.
It occurs to me, you are perhaps a good person to ask: years ago at a conference in the US – a software development conference, no less – I heard a speaker illustrate a point about How Not To Do Requirements Discovery with a claim about something that happened to the UK national rail system. They said that there was a cancelling of low-volume feeder lines because of low utilization, in the name of cost savings, and it devastated the ridership of the main lines, because that's how riders got to the main lines. The conference was somewhere in the 2006-2008 range I think; I don't know if this was supposed to have happened before or after privatisation. Is this something you know about? I'd like to read more about it if it's true, but I haven't been able to turn up anything in part because I don't know what search strings to use. If you have any helpful pointers, I'd be obliged.
Look up Beeching
Date: 2025-08-27 06:56 am (UTC)Privatization (yes, under Thatcherism, though not her personal project) compounded the problem in the 1990s, particularly because it was handled extra badly even above and beyond the dogma that the private sector and free enterprise are always more "efficient" than government at running infrastructure. But it was already broken because just having trunk lines with no branches doesn't work.
Fortunately for your research, Beeching, the instigator, had a distinctive name, and lots and lots of people with different perspectives have written any amount of detail about how awful he was.
Re: Look up Beeching
Date: 2025-08-27 08:20 am (UTC)Excellent! Thanks so much!
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-27 08:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-27 09:43 pm (UTC)Wanting to be user-centered and focus on figuring out where people want to travel is very well-meaning, and I approve of the impulse. But doing requirements discovery by studying how people behave – or even the desires they express – engaging with the present inadequate system just reinscribes its present iniquities harder and deeper.
The author betrays in how they present the OC's reasoning a very American idea how how transit systems relate to cities: the city (meaning all the human activity in it as well as its structures) is conceptualized as a static given and that transit, as something to be bolted onto the city after, is conceptualized as being a success to the extent it conforms to the present city. The city is imagined rock and the transit system is imagined water.
But the relationship of transit and urban environment is bi-directional. Water carves rocks, given time and volume. The city will conform to the transit it is given. Consequently, it is also of critical importance to design your transit system to bring about the city you want to have. Whatever city is the consequence of your transit system is the city you are going to wind up with, so transit design had better be organized around some idea of what you want that city to be like. Transit design needs to be aspirational, or it just makes present problems worse.