Lost in Lualand

an early note on Winnaretta Singer

2026-02-15T22:50:13Z

i'm in the middle of Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac by Sylvia Kahan, which is fascinating so far. i'm really looking forward to doing a writeup on it once i'm done. tl;dr: it's a biography of this chick who was the Big Lesbian Money in the Parisian music scene during her lifetime; she personally commissioned a bunch of Composers You've Heard Of and had them debut at her salons and such.

and, yeah, as i said, a full writeup will come later, but rn i'm just noting something that struck me / gave me an unexpected Some Kinda Feeling, idk—

( this is probably all really banal to ppl who read more history and/or queer theory than me idk lol )

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[book post] The Poet Empress by Shen Tao

2026-02-05T01:59:51Z

This was a really solid page-turner. I think marketing did this book a little dirty—the cover art gave me romantasy vibes, and the marketing copy called it "dark epic fantasy," but I don't think it's quite either of those things? It's a full-speed-ahead court intrigue throwdown that happens to be in a fantasy setting. A very cool fantasy setting, to be clear, and I could imagine some fun building-out-of-the-world if there's ever any more books in this universe, but as-is, most of the action here is about secrets and close spaces rather than magic or battles or romance.

( Read more... )

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[book post] Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant trans. Douglas Parmée

2026-02-05T01:11:21Z

I saw this summary of Bel-Ami somewhere...

The story chronicles journalist Georges Duroy's corrupt rise to power from a poor former cavalry NCO in France's African colonies, to one of the most successful men in Paris, most of which he achieves by manipulating a series of powerful, intelligent, and wealthy women.

...and was like "oh my God this is SO my shit I must read it IMMEDIATELY." (And then was pleased to discover I apparently already downloaded it a few months ago, so, uh, apparently past-me had the same thought and just got distracted haha.) Anyone who knows my taste knows that "messy drama," "scoundrels being scoundrels," "terrible dinner parties," "dudes seducing and/or being seduced by cougars," and so on, are all on the shortlist of Things That Are Instantly Interesting To Me, and BOY HOWDY does Bel-Ami deliver on all those fronts.

What I wasn't expecting was—

( moderate spoilers for the ending, if you care )

Anyway, this was a rollicking good ride; fun as all hell; if it seems like the kind of thing you might like, you will in fact like it, give it a shot. I kept shouting "oh NO" while reading, was occasionally hollering at Duroy to KEEP GOING or NO STOP; it was a rush.

I only knew of Maupassant via his short stories (aside: is it more correct to refer to him as "Maupassant" or "de Maupassant"? no idea how the French name thing works here)—I read "The Necklace" out of one of my mom's textbooks when I was a kid, alongside a couple others I don't remember as well—but I'm surprised I'd never heard of him for his longer stuff! It moved along at such a gallop and was so entertaining throughout. I dunno if you'd want to teach it in high school, exactly (see: aforementioned blackpilledness; I'm not sure if Maupassant is trying to say anything Super Deep here or if he's simply just giving an Incisive, Biting Look at society, which doesn't make the best class material I suppose), but I enjoyed the ride so much. Like a classier and cleverer high-concept The OC, or something. It's possible that tinge of blackpilledness might've been wearying at a longer length, but as-is, I was captivated throughout.

Other scattered stuff I remember enjoying:

( Read more... )

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[book post] Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

2026-02-05T00:29:16Z

I managed to miss the explosion of "romantasy" as a genre so entirely that, when I went to a writer's workshop a year and a half ago, and a fellow workshopper read one of my stories and was like "yo, you could totally make this into a romantasy and make bank," I was like "oh cool, thanks! what's romantasy, again?" And when another workshopper sidled up to me afterwards and said, hey, this is good but it is absolutely not romantasy, do NOT take that other person's advice," I was like "oh cool, thanks! uh, what's romantasy, exactly?"

I then proceeded to spend all my time post-workshop frittering around writing a bunch of Exactly What I Want To Write without bothering to learn a single damn thing about The State Of Modern Publishing or researching the market at all, so, y'know, thank you kindly fellow students & sorry that your thoughts were so wasted upon me...!

But even so, I managed to vaguely glean a couple factoids and takes about this whole "romantasy" thing. Y'know, the sorts of takes you see on Tumblrs and in Substacks and such—"let women enjoy things" vs "they're pornographic trash" or whatever. Which sure rhymed with some stuff I remember hearing when Twilight was a hit, so when I finally got around to reading Fourth Wing, I was expecting... something like Twilight, right? Something not-really-to-my-tastes but nonetheless satisfying and pulpy? Like, I read the whole series back then, and while I didn't love them and wouldn't have read them if they weren't a popular phenomenon, like... they were in fact a pretty good time! I remember the third book in particular having a very satisfying progression and a cool final battle! I liked the weird Americana backstory stuff with that Jasper guy! The vampire baseball shit was legitimately charming! It was very easy for me to read those books, even as a judgy know-it-all teenager, and see what the appeal was.

I say this to establish some non-snob credentials because I worry I come off like a dragon here sometimes. "I can enjoy fun and normal and kinda trashy things," I say, persuasively and convincingly.

But like... Fourth Wing... really...?

Even in the depths of my virus-induced delirium, I found myself cringing at so much of the language—every instance of "for the win" was like nails on the chalkboard of my soul; so much of the language was just stupid or self-contradictory on a line-by-line level. And by God it repeats itself, often, as though it's worried you're... only barely skimming the text? only half-paying attention? so you need basic stuff repeated to you over and over? but it managed to do this so much it annoyed me even in the depths of my virus-induced delirium! Ahhh!!! (I commented on Tumblr that part of this might just be a "house style" thing? I guess?? if so I hate it???)

And there's so many logical/plausibility inconsistencies—each minor in their own right, each which might be easy to overlook on their own—but they pile up so much I was just left wondering what the stakes were or what basic facts were or who or what I was supposed to care about, so often, that I was just confused and annoyed most of the time.

Like:

( This section is literally me just scrolling through my Kindle notes and rambling on everything I marked with a "???". It gets so long oh my God. )

( the rest of my thoughts )

...in conclusion I do not think I am the right person to aim to try and write anything in the category of "romantasy" anytime soon.

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books read; fics written

2026-02-03T09:08:07Z

i have been so miserably sick for nearly two weeks now. woe is me!

***

during that time, in varying states of lucidity i have finished reading:

* The Poet Empress by Shen Tao (good)
* Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (terrible)
* Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant trans. Douglas Parmée (LMAO???)

if you would like further commentary on any of the above, lmk and i will pontificate accordingly~

***

in varying states of lucidity i have also been dashing off fills for the three sentence ficathon. mostly variations-on-the-theme-of-Clair-Obscur-incest because empirically that is What The People Want & i aim to please: un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six.

***

HOPE ALL Y'ALL ARE COUGHING A LOT LESS THAN I AM; take care; ta for now~

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partial notes on Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life by Jean-Michel Nectoux

2025-09-22T22:02:06Z

When, in the course of human events, one reads a little bit too much of Marilynne Robinson's incredible prose, and then plays a little bit too much Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and thus gets the two very different types of work all muddled in one's head, and is thus seized with the need to go spit out many thousands of words of Clair-Obscur-fanfiction-in-the-style-of-Marilynne-Robinson, but becomes aware partway through the project that one's understanding of the culture and structure of the Paris Conservatory during the Belle Époque era is incredibly thin, and this lack of understanding is really becoming awkward given that one has gone and invented an entire subplot involving multiple professors at aforementioned conservatory in one's fanfiction based on a passing mention in canon that "oh such-and-such character went to conservatory" and literally nothing else—well, it thus becomes necessary to go read a well-regarded biography of a contemporaneous French composer to amend that lack of knowledge.

Which is how I found myself reading Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life by Jean-Michel Nectoux (translated by Roger Nichols).

("You really have a knack for nerd-sniping yourself," a friend observed dryly when I explained my present pitiable state of affairs. Yeah I sure do, huh.)

As I've been reading this primarily for convoluted fanfiction research purposes, what follows should not be construed as a review or anything even approaching one (I haven't even finished reading the book yet!), but, more of a... thinking-aloud session? Because there's a great deal that's amused me, and also a great deal that's made me very ponderous, and also stuff that just straight-up confused me (recall my aforementioned staggering lack of historical/contextual knowledge)... and yeah the only way I know how to think these days is via blog posts, apparently.

( Read more... )

Oh, also, one last funny bit about the translation: there's a bunch of words that are left with the French spelling, for no particular reason I can discern? The funniest of these is "rôle," which is always spelled the French way, even though there is no semantic difference to be had there. Whatcha trying to prove with that little hat over the O, lol. Though I guess The New Yorker still spells coordinate and cooperate as "coördinate" and "coöperate" so. I guess we all have our little spelling hangups :P

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Catch-Up Book Post

2025-06-05T22:51:31Z

Been a while since I bookblogged here, huh? This isn't EVERYTHING, but this post already took me fucking hours to type up, so, let's get into it—

Jhereg by Steven Brust
Mickey7 by Ashton Edward

Both of these books were romps, though the former is the more compelling overall package.

( Jhereg )

( Mickey7 )

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart (DNF, 48%)
Honest to God by John A.T. Robinson (DNF, 54%)
Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thích Nhất Hạnh (DNF, 24%)
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright

Look, to tip my hand, I'm in the (very!) early phase of writing a weird fantasy/historical/pastiche-y novel that dares to ask questions like "damn what was it like to be The Greatest Haterliest Poaster Of All Time" and also "what if Martin Luther was a chick" and "what if Martin Luther was two people instead of one" and "what if those people ~~kissed~~ failed to kiss" and "what if Martin Luther were a radical pacifist on top of all the other crazy shit he was doing" and "what if sacred music was actually efficacious and had geopolitical implications" and so on. I blame Lyndal Roper specifically for presenting a portrait of Martin Luther so vivid and intriguing that I could not help but go patently insane over him thereafter.

The logical next step for researching such a novel would be to read up on the theology and history of that period, because even if I'm VERY heavy on the pastiche aspects, it's nice to understand the historical context and some contemporaneous sources/writings for the period of history I'm interested in, if only for riffing purposes, yaknow.

Alas, however, I'm a magpie with no self-control, and thus easily beguiled by Every Other Book I Trip Over On The Way To The Stuff I Should Actually Be Reading, which is how I wound up with this grab-bag of rather more contemporary theology.

All of which I am entirely unqualified to properly evaluate, to be clear, as someone who's variously identified as "Southern Baptist," "Christian agnostic," "deist," "Quaker," "neopagan," "animist," and "some weird woo bullshit syncretic thing ig, sorry it's cringe I know" at various points in my life. But that sure won't stop me from prattling about 'em on my blog.

( That All Shall Be Saved )

( Honest to God )

( Living Buddha, Living Christ )

( Surprised By Hope )

Aside: all of these books felt pretty repetitive. Something to do with the genre, I guess? No way to theology-y people to feel like they've gotten your point across without restating it three different ways? IDK.

ANYWAY. I should probably quit dicking around with these books for a bit, since, y'know, novel. I gotta read more Martin Luther himself and also probably some John Calvin. (Alas this means my copy of Kosuke Koyama's Five Mile an Hour God will likely remain mostly-unread on my shelf. Did I mention I'm a magpie. Books pile up in my home whenever I get on a weird pseudo-reasearch-y kick, and I am blessed with an indulgent partner who just keeps buying me more bookshelves instead of telling me to cut it the hell out, which is very sweet of him, but also I could really use someone to stop me before I commit more Irresponsible Spending Crimes... though I saw someone the other day comparing book-buying to wine-buying, e.g. hey it's valid and normal to let some of them age in the cellar & have more than you'll be able to drink; you want to have good wine when the time is right! and UNFORTUNATELY this is very effective for allowing me to continue in my profligate ways. RIP me.)

...okay yeah I couldn't find any way to fit Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik into all of this. Spinning Silver was very good, but I don't have much to say! The primary romance was a total nothingburger, but that's fine because mostly the book is about Miryem girlbossing her way through Rumpelstiltskin and that shit totally rules. I would like to read several more books about moneylenders Being Incredibly Good At Their Job. The book gets a bit bloated and flabbier as it goes along (though the parts with secondary-girlboss Irina and horrible little man Mirnatius can stay; those bits were great) but never enough to knock it down from the "very good" tier. Fairytale retellings aren't normally my thing but this one was solid.

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[book post] Home by Marilynne Robinson

2025-05-01T01:25:23Z

I was having a chat with someone recently about different theories of soteriology—as a former Southern Baptist amongst a bunch of thoroughly-secular-from-birth jackrabbits, I get a charge out of explaining weirdo protestant folk-theology stuff when it comes up—and when I mentioned there's a set of Christians who believe "hell is real, but people in hell are free to repent & be saved from it at any time they choose," he was surprised and puzzled.

"Wouldn't everyone simply choose to leave hell, in that case? Like, if I died and woke up in hell, pretty quick I'd be like... welp, I sure called that shot wrong. Guess I'd better repent."

I pointed out that repentance, in Christian thought, isn't just an acknowledgment of "well, Jesus was right after all." It entails a change of character, an act of submission: ye shall know them by their fruits.

He shrugged. "I mean. I'm still in hell. Repentance seems like the better alternative?"

I mean, yeah, sure seems that way! But the intuitive comparison that made sense to me, back when I was a Christian, was: have you ever done something wrong, and you knew you did something wrong, but you dragged and dragged your feet on making amends and apologizing, because the horribleness of standing face-to-face with the person you wronged felt impossibly painful, even worse than just choking down your own shame and getting on as best as possible? The people in hell feel that way, I imagine.

Anyone who's experienced an act of undeserved mercy knows the surprise and the sheer relief of the thing, I think. All the moreso if it's granted without fuss, without fanfare, plainly and automatically and wholly. But I think they also know how horrible and humiliating it is to get there—to drag yourself before someone else's judgment, to admit plainly what you've done, to face their pain and feel it as your own, and to make yourself vulnerable to whatever judgment they wish to render. I mean, provided you knew and expected and accepted the worst possible judgment as a just and plausible outcome. So you take that feeling, ratchet it up to a cosmic scale, think of how often in our own lives we ghost or avoid or talk around our transgressions and wounds and trespasses, because that's easier than saying the words—yeah, given that particular theological framework, I could imagine someone nursing their wounds unto eternity.

Home by Marilynne Robinson is not about soteriology, not directly, though the characters, being all of a 1950s-Iowa-Protestant bent, do discuss the nature of salvation at length a few times. It is about forgiveness, though—and I don't think I've ever read another book that so keenly captures the pain and complexity of the thing.

( Read more... )

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[book post] The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

2024-10-20T07:48:13Z

I picked up this book because one person whose taste I trust said they loved it, and another person whose taste I trust said they hated it.

That's gotta be the fastest way to get me to read a book, by the way. What can I say? I'm the kind of gal always who wants to stick her nose right in the middle of a dispute and suss out who's right!!!

And I think my opinion of this novel fell somewhere solidly in-between those two poles—well, at least until I read the afterword that was tucked into the back of my edition, but let's death-of-the-author that right outta here and come back to it later.

SO. The Last Samurai is a novel suffering from a very unfortunate name collision—it has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie, nothing to do with Meiji-era Japan, nothing to do with war or battle or any such thing. (The novel came first, for what it's worth.)

Instead, The Last Samurai is the story of Sibylla, a young, charmingly-lowkey-deranged multilingual humanities academic in late-1980s Oxford, who gets PISSED OFF after putting in a lot of work to translate some scholarship that turns out to be SHODDY and ILL-FOUNDED, and in fact she is so pissed off by this that she decides to (1) fuck off from academia entirely, (2) hooks up with a foppish, callow, pseudointellectual guy she meets at a party, (3) gets pregnant, (4) decides to keep the kid but doesn't tell the dad about it, and (5) works a really-poorly-paid typing/editing job from home so she can raise the kid, Ludo, to be a piano/language/etc prodigy, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill.

( the good )

( the bad )

And, see, since that came right at the end this is making me sound way more negative about the book than I actually am. It was a fun ride! particularly in the first half! I'm glad I read it! but skip the afterword, jeez.

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[book post] Search: A Novel by Michelle Huneven

2024-08-21T08:05:29Z

I picked this book up on an impulse, in part due to a pull quote from the WaPo review: "like Marilynne Robinson with a light vinaigrette." Y'all may recall I lost my mind over Gilead a few months ago. I was hankering for "that, but in a different flavor."

As it turns out: this book is not that at all. Nothing here rivals the depth of what Robinson's trying to wrestle with or Robinson's lyricism, sorry.

But! it's still a plenty fun book, with some charm and some interesting things to say.

( Read more... )

( vague nonspecific spoilers for the ending )

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[book post] The Default World by Naomi Kanakia

2024-06-06T22:54:39Z

The setup for this novel is deliciously fun: Jhanvi, a trans woman working a dead-end job in Sacramento, decides to foist herself upon her college-buddy-slash-sexting-partner Henry, who lives in one of those Burning-Man-y polycule-y group houses in San Francisco. The plan: Jhanvi will show up on their doorstep, invite herself into their lives, manipulate Henry into marrying her, and then use those sweet sweet healthcare benefits he gets from his BigTech employer to pay for all the feminization surgeries she's interested in.

You'd expect this to be a perfect setup for some good satirical skewering of the Burning-Man-y polycule-y group house, and you'd be right (there's a really funny running bit where Katie, the ardent police abolitionist, is determined to figure out who's been calling the cops on the street-harasser guy near their house; Jhanvi knows it's the townie bartender at a place down the road, but sure isn't telling Katie because who needs a self-righteous Burning Man person giving her shit; also, the dynamics of Who Ferries The Drugs Around For Our Outdoor Naked Party Weekend had me in absolute stitches).

But Jhavni's absolutely relentless cynicism does start to wear after a while—an intended effect, I think. Yeah, the group house people are kinda shallow and willfully naive, but Jhanvi is trying to worm her way into their circle, and she thinks and acts in some pretty appalling ways to that end. It helps that she's pretty self-aware about what she's doing—there's a particularly delicious bit where Jhanvi rolls into Katie's room and we get a blow-by-blow account of "here's how I'm going to manipulate this chick in exactly this specific way"—but, still. Doesn't feel right to use people that way so relentlessly, right? and they do have some virtues of their own, right?

(There's a specific mode of thought Jhanvi has, an absolute dogged realism-bordering-on-reductionism, which means she's often the person speaking up to the effect of, "Look, let's be real, this party is not about ~*~liberation and justice~*~, it's about hot rich people having sex"—seeing through layers of bullshit to get to the heart of a matter. I know plenty of people like this IRL, and I'm lucky enough to call some of them my friends—that clarity of thought is an intensely admirable thing, and rare and hard to find! But there's a flipside to it—they can become very determined that their read is the 100% correct one, and become pretty dismissive of nuance or alternate perspectives in cases where they may be warranted. It's not the main thing Jhanvi's going on, but I thought I'd mention it specifically here, since I'm not sure I've seen this specific style-of-thought so vividly portrayed in fiction before, and I'd be really curious to see how other readers responded to it / what they thought about it; I found it really interesting!)

So you've got Jhanvi's gradual turnaround, from grifter-we're-cheering-for to grifter-we're-still-cheering-for-but-girl-can-you-tamp-down-on-the-grifting-just-a-little-bit. The book has a final arc and conclusion in which Jhanvi does have a change of heart, does something sudden and altruistic and selfless that's meant to stand for a larger shift in her character—but the stakes of that decision feel too low, almost abstract, and the payoff feels rushed in a way that didn't quite make me buy that shift.

I suspect if Kanakia had leaned all the way into the overthinking-social-class-dynamics-in-every-single-conversation angle, Death Note/Yukio Mishima/battle-anime-where-some-sidekick-character-is-overthinking-every-punch-aloud style, with even more excruciating detail, I could've bought that shift more readily, because I'd be agonizingly familiar with the contours of Jhanvi's mind. Or, if that final arc had a little bit more buildup/denouement/heft to it, I might've appreciated it a little more. As the book stands, it sort of awkwardly in-between those poles, so it ended up falling a little flat for me as a whole, even though I really enjoyed all the component pieces.

I would definitely read the next book by this author, though. It read very breezily and was a lot of fun and there's some interesting layers I'm still chewing on.

(Oh, shouts to Roshie, the weird, earnest, unsexy, way-too-good-at-her-job nerd who lives upstairs. It's kinda obvious Kanakia loves her too much, and you know what? So do I.)

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[book post] The Patrick Melrose novels, books 1 & 2

2024-05-19T01:02:22Z

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn (Patrick Melrose #1)

This book started out so delightfully and totally and completely my shit that they may as well have stamped "FOR LUA INTERNETPERSON" on the cover. All of these characters are screwed up in ways ranging from "severe" to "absolutely god-awful." The narrative voice is witty and snarky as hell.* It's all even pointing toward culminating in a godawful dinner party. Yes!!! Yes!!!

( Read more... )

Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn (Patrick Melrose #2)

This one I liked rather less. It's another quick read, playing out over the course of either twenty-four or forty-eight in-universe hours—my memory of the exact timing is a little fuzzy, as it is to the protagonist himself. You see, young Patrick from the first novel is now twenty-two, hates his father (very understandably), is pretty well fucked up from his childhood, and now is a kinda-functional drug addict. Luckily his family's rich, so he can simply use money to avoid some of the worst possible pitfalls (he's dropping money on fancy dinners and nice hotels without so much as a blink), but it turns out even the life of a rich drug addict is a fucking mess. The book opens with Patrick on a flight from London to New York—his father's died, and he's tasked with crossing the Atlantic to bring back the body. While in New York, Patrick spends that bewildering twenty-four-or-forty-eight-hour period briefly visiting the funeral home with his father's remains and a friend from the first novel... before promptly calling up his old drug dealer, failing to track down his old drug dealer, taking a taxi to the sketchy part of Manhattan in an attempt to score some drugs, being high, coming down from a high, fucking up a few interpersonal relationships, doing yet more drugs, and finally flying home.

( Read more... )

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[book post] The Membranes by Chi Ta-Wei

2024-05-18T10:35:10Z

Ohhh this one was such fun.

The Membranes is a slim, mid-1990s, Taiwanese dystopian sci-fi novel. The premise: the hole over the ozone layer got bad enough that you can't live on the surface of the planet anymore, so humanity moved to the ocean floor to escape the sun's harmful cosmic rays. By the year 2100, the ocean floor has been thoroughly colonized by every nation of the earth powerful enough to project their influence downward (yielding charmingly goofy phrases like "the New San Francisco Accord (signed in the new, underwater San Francisco)").

The story is not particularly interested in the physics of how that works (not least because the answer is "lol it wouldn't;" think about the pressure at that depth and the Titan implosion). Rather, it's more interested in the cultural implications of this move to the sea floor—for instance, even with the ocean floor mostly blocking the sun's rays, skin cancer rates are high & people's skin tends to degrade more rapidly, so "skin technicians" (a sort of hybrid dermatologist/masseuse/skin-artist) are highly trained and highly paid so they can keep people's skin looking young.

I called it a dystopian novel earlier, but that's not quite right. Ta-Wei isn't interested in doing a prolonged, incisive examination of the power structures in this society, and instead pulls a tight focus on a single character: Momo, a highly successful, 30-year-old skin technician who owns her own practice and lives alone in a nice apartment. At the story's opening, she receives a letter from her mom after twenty years of estrangement; the "action" of the novel is a couple skin technician sessions that play out while Momo's trying to decide whether or not to meet with her mom; the end happens when she makes a choice and plays it out. That's all. (And I loved that tight focus, that confidence!)

And I was just so completely fascinated by this Momo chick, and the slow, patient way the story reveals more and more about her. Here's a girl who never goes out, never takes a partner nor has any interest in one, yet has chosen such a tactile, intimate line of work. She's got some technology-aided voyeuristic tendencies—not necessarily in a sexual sense, in an everything sense, in a content-to-experience-other-lives-secondhand way—that, as described, felt simultaneously so so alluring and so so claustrophobic. The slow reveal of the long-term consequences of a horrible set of surgeries she went through at a young age is satisfyingly well done, and also, there's some wonderfully unselfconsciously queer happenings, lots of unexpected eyebrow-raising chemistries between some interstitial characters—I loved it all.

I did find the ending a little... deflating? Without spoiling too much, it has that kind of rug-pull and-then-it-was-all-a-dream feel that I feel like smacks of... idk, a particularly tacky Twilight Zone episode. It's not totally out of nowhere, and I can see the buildup to it a bit in hindsight... but I mostly found myself longing for what the novel would have been, if Ta-Wei had kept to that tight, close focus on Momo, if, instead of zooming the camera out to a "damn wouldn't it be crazy if" kind of scenario, he'd let Momo's choice at the end stand on its own, and shown us what, if anything, changes about Momo afterwards.

But overall, what a romp. I'm glad I read it.

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[book post] Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

2024-05-16T23:17:15Z

After I read Gilead, I found myself thumbing through my phone contacts and texting anyone and everyone who I even vaguely suspected might've read this book. And it's a weird, specific kind of book, so the list of people I wound up texting looked something like "my mom, a friend of my mom's whom I remembered vaguely from book clubs at our house when I was little, and an acquaintance from undergrad who studied folklore & mythology." I asked each of them: did you read this? can we talk about it, please, I'm d e s p e r a t e to talk about this book with someone???

And I couldn't find anyone who'd read the damn thing! So I was left wrestling with it by myself these past few weeks.

See, the whole reason I was desperate to talk to someone is: this novel has a lot going on, multiple threads that pull together in a satisfying way—but by the end, I found myself puzzling over what to make of the whole?

I'm still puzzling, but I've got at least some notion now, I think.

( Read more... )

Weird book. Not at all what I expected! If you've read it, PLEASE sound off in the comments; I Wish To Talk With You About It

(a couple other reviews I found interesting while puzzling over this: [x], [y], [z])

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[book post] A memoir & two YA novels

2024-02-15T01:24:49Z

I still have... quite a backlog... of other books to write about... but it turns out, typing up thoughts on memoir/YA is comparatively really fast and easy, so, yeah, these books are skipping to the front of the queue:

( Molly by Blake Butler )

( We Are Totally Normal by Naomi Kanakia )

( Enter Title Here by Naomi Kanakia )

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yet more books i read lately

2023-08-24T11:01:49Z

( DNF: Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality by Lily Geismer )

( American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild )

( DNF: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy )

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some books i read lately

2023-08-17T09:23:42Z

catching up a bit! nowhere near comprehensive, this is just what i noticed when scanning my "recently read" bookshelf & started spitting out some Thoughts TM

( The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams )

( Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou )

( Acceptance: A Memoir by Emi Nietfeld )

( The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips )

( Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer )

( Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck )

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[book post] January(-ish) books

2023-02-09T22:36:04Z

( Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt )

( Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys by Joe Coulombe and Patty Civalleri )

( Maame by Jessica George )

( A Pocket Guide to Hawai`i's Birds and their Habitats by H. Douglas Pratt and Jack Jeffrey )

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webcomic reviews that no one asked for

2022-12-13T07:13:16Z

because of Reasons TM i decided to read all of Minna Sundberg's back catalog, enjoy

A Redtail's Dream

( review )

Stand Still, Stay Silent

( review, pt1 )

( THE SPOILER-Y PART OF THE REVIEW )

( review, pt2 )

Lovely People

( review )

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[book post] Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

2022-12-09T11:13:51Z

When I saw the press hype over this new Reaganland book, I thought to myself, what wonderfully serendipitous timing—I've had this nagging urge to learn more about the history of the Reagan era, and everyone says this book is really good, so I'll pick it up and find out more!

The book starts off in 1976, which is sensible enough—gotta establish the background before getting to Reagan!—and then I kept reading, and reading, and... then somehow I was still in 1976, even though my ereader told me I was 20% of the way into the book, and I thought, what the hell.

...so, yeah, that was the first time I clicked back to notice (1) the book's subtitle, which makes it abundantly clear this is about the run-up to Reagan's election, not Reagan's presidency, and (2) dear GOD this thing is over a thousand pages long.

("Lua do you just download ebooks compulsively without even checking the most basic information about them—" YES, OKAY, I KNOW I HAVE A PROBLEM)

Anyway, at that point I felt kinda committed, and was having a good enough time, so I finished reading the thing anyway. I still have no idea what the 80s were like, but learning all about the Carter administration (like... the entire Carter administration... this history is narrow in scope but incredibly comprehensive; I feel like it covered literally every national politics thing within that four-year timespan), and Reagan's rise to prominence, was plenty interesting all on its own.

The first half, in particular, was full of really interesting and new-to-me-stuff—I didn't really know much about Carter outside of "kinda unpopular president," so it was really fascinating to see such the Obama-esque energy and enthusiasm when the guy got elected, the dude's lovably-weird approach to the presidency, and the beginnings of the US's neoliberal economic turn (which Reagan accelerated, but like, Carter's the one who put Volcker in as chair of the fed, etc).

The latter half of the book starts getting into the nitty-gritty of Carter and Reagan's respective campaign trails, and thus starts to drag, with endless recountings of "and then the Reagan campaign did this one political gaffe, and then the Carter campaign did this other political gaffe, and then the Reagan campaign did a different gaffe," on and on and oh my God maybe this sort of thing is unavoidable in a political history but it's just so boring.

ANYWAY. It's been a few months since I finished reading this one, so my memory's probably fuzzy on some of the finer details, but here's some high-level highlights:

( Read more... )

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[book post] The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

2022-12-08T22:04:08Z

"If social cohesion is impossible without coercion, and coercion is impossible without the creation of social injustice, and the destruction of injustice is impossible without the use of further coercion, are we not in an endless cycle of social conflict?" -Reinhold Niebuhr

The True and Only Heaven is a great rambling shaggy dog story at its heart, though instead of being told by some bearded dude over a campfire, it's told by an academic near the end of his life, just kinda going on about The Entirety Of American Populist History, with extensive footnotes and citations.

There is a thesis here, though it's erratically argued. Lasch wants to call attention to what's good and praiseworthy in the ethic and worldview of populism—the worldview, broadly speaking, of the lower-middle class, the petit bourgeoisie, the small-time farmers and independent craftsmen and business owners that loom so large in the American consciousness. He doesn't deny the characteristic vices of this class—how their feelings too often manifest as or get entangled with racism, tribalism, and insularity. But their virtues, he argues, are too often overlooked or trammeled down by the progressive mainstream: their egalitarianism,their respect for workmanship, their respect for loyalty, and their struggle against resentment. In this respect his outlook's very similar to James C. Scott's, in Two Cheers for Anarchism:( intro )

( the good parts )

( the meh parts )

( the annoying parts )

( takeaways )

( other interesting stuff )

( sick burns )

so yeah that's the book!

check out the tag on my tumblr if you want the highlights/quotes/etc i noted while i was reading the thing~

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[book post] Two novellas

2022-08-08T05:57:06Z

( 17776 (What Football Will Look Like in the Future) by Jon Bois )

( Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress )

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[book post] Five books

2022-08-08T05:53:02Z

tl;dr: entertaining book that unfortunately is probably a pack of lies; Discourse TM; kitsch 1; kitsch 2; math that is also fanfiction

( Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein )

( Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò )

( Miracle Town: Creating America's Bavarian Village in Leavenworth, Washington by Ted Price and John Miller )

( Death on Tap by Ellie Alexander )

( BONUS FANFICTION ROUND: The Poetry of Logic by RookSacrifice )

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[book post] March books

2022-04-02T22:57:26Z

( Blankets by Craig Thompson )

( The Likeness by Tana French )

( Dangerous Crowns by A.K. Fedeau )

( Red Plenty by Francis Spufford )

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[book post] February books

2022-03-01T10:09:02Z

Broken Harbor by Tana French (Dublin Murder Squad #4)

In the previous book in this murder mystery "series" (I'm using the term loosely, since you can read these books out of order—but a bit character in the previous book always becomes the main character in the next one, which is kinda cool), we're introduced to Mike Kennedy, a murder detective with the highest solve rate in the squad. In said previous book, Kennedy comes across as annoyingly bullheaded and a bit thick, so when I read that he was the main character in Broken Harbor, I balked for a moment. Not this dude? of all the dudes? surely? maybe I should just read something else?

But, y'know, the viewpoint character in Faithful Place is a biased, judgy asshole, and most people become way more interesting if you actually get inside their own heads, so I decided to give it a shot.

And, hey, I did end up liking Kennedy! Quite a lot! When you're in his own head, his boring by-the-books approach and annoying sense of superiority become both endearing and sympathetic, and French does an excellent job of setting up exactly the perfect plot to push every single one of his buttons—I greatly enjoyed watching this weirdo lowkey control freak getting repeatedly one-upped by reality. Bonus points for the whole setting; "spooky houses abandoned after the 2008 housing crash becoming very literally spooky" hecking rules. I found the book's ultimate "whodunit" it a bit on the cheesy side, and the B-plot was wobbly, in ways both good and bad (without spoiling: Kennedy's got a weird relationship with his sister, and while I really liked some aspects of it—stuff it brought out in Kennedy's character that we never would have seen elsewhere, and a surprisingly sympathetic depiction of a complicated situation in a way I hadn't seen before—but other parts of it landed in a funky way that left a bad taste in my mouth). But if you're looking for "moderately elevated/classy pulp," this fits the bill excellently, and while it doesn't quite pack the emotional whallop that Faithful Place did, it makes up for it in sheer page-turner-y-ness; I could barely put the thing down.

Did not finish: In the Woods by Tana French (Dublin Murder Squad #1)

There's a bunch of times when I really love a book by an author, so I go back and read their debut (from many years prior), and I think to myself, "damn, I'm glad other people liked this, because otherwise this author probably wouldn't have gone on to write the book I actually did like... but, I absolutely would not have picked this one up out of a lineup what the heck."

This is one of those times.

In The Woods has a number of amateurish annoyances which I could've coped with, had they been the only problems: French's prose, which is so vivid and clear in latter books, is purple and overwrought here, and the book's sense of pacing is all wonky (it montages whole weeks that I had actually wanted to see in detail; it keeps coming up with annoying contrived reasons for why our heroes can't interview obvious suspects; the scenes are often too short and break off too abruptly, which really messes with the overall momentum).

But the real issue is that our viewpoint character, Rob, is just flat and inconsistent. French's books are carried by her character's voices, and where Faithful Place's Frank is a compellingly snarky asshole, and Broken Harbor's Kennedy is a compellingly stubborn bulldog, Rob is... overthink-y? artsy? chooses weird metaphors? I couldn't get a handle on what French was trying to do with him, really. He's prone to broad statements like, "[Us detectives'] relationship with the truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass", and "In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood," and "I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern," and God I did an involuntary eyeroll just typing those out. (I flipped to a random page for each of those! They aren't hard to find!) The most interesting thing about him is his relationship with his detective partner Cassie—a sort of cozy quasi-sibling closeness—but even that felt like it was painted a bit more with Vibes TM than concrete stuff, if you'll allow the phrasing.

Eventually, I realized I was going to shoot myself if they spent any more time on this one obviously-going-nowhere property management subplot, and if my goal in reading this was "to know enough about Cassie for The Likeness to land properly" (because I know Frank Mackey is featured in The Likeness and goddamn it I want more of him), I was pretty much already there.

So, about halfway through, I went and Wikipedia spoilered myself for the ending and... sigh... I won't spoil it here (feel free to do so in the comments if you'd like to discuss it), but, suffice to say, I'm glad I tapped out early.

I still have high hopes for The Likeness, though. Will report back.

some dude's phd thesis

I wanted to know some more Alaska history! So I read some, and it was fun; here's some highlights.

a fuckload of persona 4 fanfiction

there's a special kind of Vibe TM to inhaling several chapters of a bajillion-word schmoopy hurt/comfort Persona 4 fic while riding in a tiny bushplane over the arctic while experiencing high turbulence. it was good, would repeat that vibe

...does anyone have any particular Persona 4 fic recs? i am a simple woman; i just need to see my boy yosuke either (1) doing horrible things* or (2) getting whumped

* I'm so fucking obsessed with the bit in canon where Yosuke panics and suggests some extrajudicial murder as a solution for their problems??? and it made me realize i have a Type TM; it's called "callow nerds doing awful shit under stress" and i fucking love it

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