roadrunnertwice

and oh god it's so good, that unique polished authorial confidence of The Fortunate Fall is so back, and like The Fortunate Fall it's a book that's somehow slipped out of time, not exactly in sync with the present moment in sf/f but maybe both older and newer, and it's very quiet and calm except for that bit in a recent chapter which actually made me make an involuntary noise of shock and alarm out loud, and I have no idea where it's going and I hope she sticks the landing but right now the vibes are Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand and The Left Hand of Darkness, and what with those being two of my favourite novels ever, I'm having a very good time.

kaberett

Behold my works: today I went to the leisure centre, and went into the leisure centre, and went into the gym, and poked around a bit, and retreated to the stairwell to hyperventilate... and then WENT TO A CHANGING SPACE and CHANGED MY CLOTHING and went back into the gym. And picked! things! up!!! and put them down again!!!!!

I have now Touched Barbell, appear to have accidentally skipped most of Phase 2 of Liftoff in favour of Barbells, Apparently, but honestly the biggest and most exciting bit of this is that I did go back into The Gym and I did push through the social anxiety of What If I'm Doing It Wrong.

It is an excellent time of year to be doing this; the cherries on the way from the gym to the bus stop are in full and exuberant flower.

kaberett

Therapist was Mean and got me to do the thing of substituting "I'm excited about" for "I'm anxious about". I Have Signed Up For The Gym, without first fixing my bike, and might even make it there Tomorrow.
On the one hand Wagamama have dropped my default order from their menu again ('tis the season!), and on the other they have introduced a gochujang-tamarind-sesame corn "ribs" situation that I am very pleased to have tried.
Social wiggles were OUTSIDE because we have achieved LIGHT ENOUGH EVENINGS.
I have almost finished A's gloves??? All That Remains is Weaving In The Second Set Of Ends.
Lebkuchen And A Glass Of Milk.

rachelmanija

18-year-old Evelyn is on a plane, transporting her father's ashes, when there's an announcement of turbulence. A passenger gets up from her seat, then collapses in the aisle. The plane begins to nosedive, and everything goes white. Then Evelyn is back on the plane, which is no longer nosediving. There's an announcement of turbulence. A passenger gets up from her seat, then collapses in the aisle. The plane begins to nosedive...

Evelyn quickly realizes that she's in a 29-minute time loop. She tries to figure out why the plane is crashing and how to stop it, but gets absolutely nowhere. She talks to other passengers. She steals their food and eats it. She watches every movie on the plane. She learns everything about everyone, except the handsome sleeping teenage boy who never wakes up during the loop. She goes through 400 loops and almost loses her mind. And then, on one loop, the boy wakes up. And on the next loop, he also realizes that he's in a loop...

Like the last novel I read by Reiss (Out of Air, the one with the teenage scuba divers), this book has a great premise. I enjoyed how Evelyn makes herself free with everything on the plane while trapped, and I also enjoyed how she and Rion, the sleeping boy, work together once he wakes up to figure out what's going on. However, it had an issue that more-or-less ruined the book for me. Rion suggests something that somehow Evelyn failed to try in 400 loops, which is to follow one person on the plane at a time, and observe everything they do. It never occurred to Evelyn to watch the flight attendants, and watching one of them reveals exactly what's causing the crash. They try to prevent it in several ways that don't work. Then Rion figures out a clever plan that saves the plane and fixes the loop.

The author clearly wanted to have Evelyn be alone in the loop for a long time. I can see why she wanted that - we get a vivid sense of her frustration and despair - but it makes Evelyn seem useless when she spends ages watching movies and so forth, and then Rion figures everything out almost immediately. This is exacerbated when Rion also comes up with the plan to fix things. This wouldn't have been a problem if they'd been in the loop together much earlier - then they could have bonded while investigating, taken breaks and done the fun stuff that she did alone, and mutually figured stuff out. It would have been more fun to read and felt less sexist, which I'm sure was unintentional but is inevitable when the girl fails at everything for ages, then a boy shows up and both solves the mystery and fixes the problem.

I'll be interested to see if Reiss's third book also has a three word title that rhymes with "care."

kaberett

Things I thought would be fine: continuing to use the coffee table as an ersatz bench while I try to source a proper one at less-than-new prices.

THINGS THAT WERE NOT FINE: guess.

(I am unharmed! The coffee table is... not. The previous session was fine!!! ... the previous session was 10-20lb lower in terms of what I was lifting.)

( special interest within )

kaberett

Today I have had MRI #1 (NHS), booked follow-up appointment #1 (NHS; in June), and also booked follow-up appointment #2 (private; next Thursday).

( feeeeeeeelings )

But. BUT. I made myself put the allotment keys in my pocket before heading out for the MRI (the allotments are right behind the hospital) and then did spend two hours Communing With Plants (by which I mostly mean "weeding", obviously, which is I suppose a kind of Communion) in pleasant weather, and. And. The cherry blossom is out. Only two clusters of it so far, but -- that's two more than a week ago, and the rest of the tree is thinking really hard about it. The unfortunately sited apple I appear to have inherited is also absolutely riotous. The garlic chives are finally Properly Established. I got to graze on allium and spinach. Small fierce joys, and that.

spiralsheep

Read to 31 March 2026: 35 books (no dnfs but one I wish I had).

To read shelves: 61 books.

Current reading quote: "In the lives of the good, bad people are the deciding factor. That's just how it goes. In the lives of the bad, the good ones disappear. They don't even notice them."

Highly rated or interesting books I read in March:

- 28. Two Women Living Together, by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo, 2019 (2026), non-fiction memoir self-help, 3/5.

( Because y'all might be interested. )

- 31. Woman Alive, by Susan Ertz, 1936, novel fantasy / science fiction "feminism" (of a sort), 2/5.

( Neither good nor especially interesting but a must for feminist sf or utopia completists. )

- 33. Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre, 2009, the second edition including the previously redacted chapter 10 "The Doctor Will Sue You Now", non-fiction science biology medicine, 5/5.

I've begun reccing this to younger people a generation after this was published because it remains one of the best popular How To Think About Science books as the arguments are both clearly written and entertaining.

Worked up from newspapers columns so very quotable, e.g. pg116: "Using this process, called photosynthesis, plants store the energy from sunlight in the form of sugar (high in calories, as you know), and they can then use this sugar energy to make everything else they need: like protein, and fibre, and flowers, and corn on the cob, and bark, and leaves, and amazing traps that eat flies, and cures for cancer, and tomatoes, and wispy dandelions, and conkers, and chillies, and all the other amazing things that the plant world has going on."

Also includes the infamous one-liner about Gillian McKeith, lmao.

- 34. Patchwork, a Graphic Biography of Jane Austen, by Kate Evans, 2025, comics history biography, 5/5 or 6/5. ;-)

Superlatively brilliant. Very Kate Evans. Jane Austen's life as a patchwork of what we know, with a central interlude telling double page spread histories about where the cotton and fabrics for Jane's patchworking came from and how her gentry family benefitted from Britain's unscrupulous trades. Highly recommended both as an Austen biography that includes her all-important familial relationships, and for placing the Austens' lives into historical perspective. I also rec Evans' previous graphic biography Red Rosa about Rosa Luxemburg.

Note: I recently read The Novel Life of Jane Austen, another graphic bio, which was a solid 4/5 for the life but lacked wider context compared to Patchwork, published only six months later, which is unfortunate timing for the creators Janine Barchas and Isabel Greenberg.

kaberett

Reading. She's A Beast archives, forever and always (by which I mean that I am now up to October 2023).

Another few pages of my Wicked Problems (Max Gladstone) reread.

Also an absolutely baffling academic paper that is technically relevant to my academic interests but which... doesn't really explain why what it's doing is better than state-of-the-art, sure as hell doesn't demonstrate it adequately with an appropriate range of reference materials, and cites only my reference materials paper and not my one on actual real life rocks, which it absolutely should, especially as it is citing [redacted for professionalism] like it's a solid contribution to the field.

Writing. Manuscript is over 10k words???

Listening. Hidden Almanac continues; presently we are relistening to another chunk I've theoretically heard once already but actually slept through. Knitting during it continues a good way of preventing myself from falling asleep. I continue to enjoy myself. (Eminent Domain and Tapping Of Ley Lines is the chunk we're currently in.)

Playing. Games various with... nieces and nephews??? plus A's other relatives, particularly Boggle, Shithead (to which I have been newly introduced), and Five Crowns.

Cooking. ... I made a big batch of chilli? I made a big batch of chilli.

Eating. Many and various exciting cheeses. Some excellent potato dauphinoise that I didn't have to cook.

Exploring. North Leigh Roman villa, Chedworth Roman villa, some surrounding woodlands, and Davis's Copse near Curbridge (BLUEBELLS).

Making & mending. A's glove progresses, by which I mean I've stalled a little over the past few days because I foolishly decided I didn't need to bring my circs with me and therefore I am knitting flat on DPNs and it is Suboptimal. But. Nearly ready to turn around for the other side of the flap. Nearly.

Growing. Lemongrass much cheerfuller for having been put back into the warm box. No evidence of aubergine yet (yes I know I'm late). Broad beans now actually properly coming up!!! Oca doing nothing. Cherry finally just about ready to start blossoming as of Wednesday; josta definitively blossoming and really quite green; project Build Up Spinach Seed Stash progressing nicely.

Observing. Pheasants! BLUEBELLS, both as a sea in woodland and on banks with primroses. Cowslips. So many excellent spring flowers. Pheasants; COOT EGGS; Egyptian goslings; and I have spent the past couple of days being Menaced by a Canada goose that is OUTRAGED whenever anybody... passes it... on a tarmac drive... even if they're doing so in a motor vehicle. All extremely satisfactory.

rachelmanija

Click on my Ruth Chew tag to see what sort of books she's known for: small-scale children's fantasies focusing on magic-infused everyday objects and creatures in Brooklyn. This is her hard-to-find first book, which is not a fantasy.

The main characters are a brother and sister who were left, along with their never-seen younger brother and sister, in the care of their grandmother who feeds them canned tomatoes - yuck! They leave a note saying they're doing a long sleepover at a friend's house, then run away to the site where they often went camping, buy a cheap boat, and live on an island.

This is entertaining enough on its own, but mostly of interest because it shows how she course-corrected in her fantasy books: the flaws in this book are corrected, and she melds its strengths (likable kid characters, a focus on the practicalities and small details of both the human and natural worlds, a friendly old woman) with excellent small-scale magic. In all the rest of her books, there are just two kids - no unnecessary and off-page younger siblings. There are no mean kids or bullying (this book has two mean bullies who just drop out of the story). The parents are around but the kids' adventures take place out of sight, so there's no implausible runaway plots. And the old ladies are witches, which makes them even better!

kaberett

The fancy bakery had Two Cardamom Buns left when we got there, so I got one of them, and we took our Pastries down to the New River (which is still neither of those things) for the traditional springtime pursuit of Watching The Waterfowl.

Coot the first very obligingly stood up to show us their eggs after really not very much waiting at all, and they are still eggs! No gaping maws there yet. Coot the second was a total surprise to me; I think I'd not been along that particular stretch recently. This one was Not Obliging At All and indeed remained resolutely circular atop its nest, removing its head from beneath its wing only once and only briefly, but we deduce from the fact that it was atop the nest that Orbs Exist.

Pastry course then actually took place sat on a bench just down the bank from a very sleepy pile of Egyptian goslings all huddled up, until they were Alarmed by bread and then gradually heaved themselves up to investigate grass. I remain fascinated by the differences in size evident at this stage of development within the one clutch.

Also; found a bridge hidden in a hedge. Collaborated on iterating toward a solution for a problem. Picked things up and put them down again. Indulged some special interest. Good Job Team.

roadrunnertwice

So, in many recent years, there's been a massive fall PDF sale run by an on-again/off-again comics publisher called Shortbox. The gal who runs it, Zainab Akhtar, has a tremendous sense of taste and is plugged in to scenes of emerging cartoonists in a way that seems implausible, so the offering is always rich in this very particular overlap of weird/high-quality/unobtainable/inexpensive.

I think they're taking this year off, but keep an eye out in the future.

Nina Vakueva — Dream Loop (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. Lightweight but very nice looking.

MIUWN — How to be a Good Human (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. A cryptic little scented-vinyl nightmare.

Serena Cirillo — Joy (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. A girl absorbed in a work deadline builds a droid to help clean out the squalid family house she's moved back into.

I liked this a lot, it's got this old quiet one-off manga feel. You know how sometimes a really top-quality scanlation team will make a point of picking the most off-path stuff they can find, just quiet oddball things with almost no chance of a commercial translation? This feels like one of those. Hmm, I guess that was a really vague description in spite of its specificity. Anyway, it's quiet and contemplative and pretty. I thought the bridge scene in the middle where Joy is looking at Mari's old family photos and perceptual time comes to a halt was really striking and effective.

Mapurl — Injest (comics)

Jan 21

2025 Shortbox haul. I liked this a lot! A dark little story with a very pleasing shape.

Asia Miller — Jubilee (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. This was berserk, I loved it. A librarian with a pillbug motif joins up with a sluttily-dressed bounty hunter, and then a bunch of Incal-lite shit happens.

Pupi — To Buy a Forest (comics)

Jan 22

Shortbox 2025 haul. Slice of life. Not bad. "Burocracy..."

Fortune's Fool, Tess Powel — The Last Wizard of Cwmdafi (comics)

Jan 22

Shortbox 2025 haul. This comes in both English and Welsh versions, which is rad. Woman moves back to her grandpa's hometown to take over his wizarding business. Small town small business slice of life. Good ol' Cupboard Cat.

Erin Roseberry — Fallen into the Garden (comics)

Feb 6

Shortbox 2025 haul. Another lovely little SF comic by the author of The Maker of Grave Goods, this time featuring lesbian dogs.

lilyresh — Flood Water Maiden (comics)

Feb 6

Shortbox 2025 haul. Sort of a medium-dark mood piece in an ongoing catastrophic flood. Not bad, though it kind of trails off.

Jeff Noon — Falling Out of Cars

Mar. 21

It’s been a long time since I read anything by Jeff Noon, but he loomed large in my experience of the ’90s. This one was a Joanne McNeil rec.

Took me a tentative age to work through this, with many interludes of putting it away for months. This is intense psychedelic SF in a sort of tone-poem mode, and it’s in large part about dementia. It’s very beautiful, and intensely irritating and unpleasant to the touch; there has been a global and permanent outbreak of a strange physical and metaphysical sickness (sometimes called the Noise), and effectively it has fractured the entire world into a single vast Alzheimer’s ward with no nursing staff in sight. The effects of this scenario on the narrative voice and the momentum of the story are brutal. Most of the people we see are stumbling blearily on, drunk on loss and pain and dissatisfaction, and only intermittently capable of maintaining a train of thought or a thread of purpose.

Our protagonists, at least, are on a quest; a rich man who blames the current state of the world on a single great sin has sent them in search of broken shards of a magical mirror. The shards and their magic are real; it’s unclear whether the rich man is right about their connection to the Noise’s origin, but it’s very clear that the world’s fall cannot be reversed.

I think I liked this without enjoying it. I definitely had to hold its poetic pain and joy and delirium at arm’s length — don’t get too invested, don’t take these people’s assertions at face value, they do not always know who they were and what they're doing. Very nearly too intense for me.

There’s a brief view of some kids who haven’t known anything but the present world, and are building new visions of what it is to be a conscious being when communication and meaning have disintegrated; while I wanted more of that, I accept that our narrator Marlene was incapable of recognizing and evaluating their lives in the way I craved.

There's also one particular segment that I found superbly thrilling and creepy, and is sticking with me harder than the rest of the book: when Peacock is telling the story of the time he killed himself. Someone pulled the trigger; someone walked away; a mind within a body is present here today — any deeper chain of causation or stain of identity has been washed away in the noise.

spiralsheep

Seasonal: and a bonus happy Old English Goddess of Spring Invented By A Christian Monk weekend! ;-P

Music: local Brummies have been breaking out the vintage Black Sabbath recently for obvious reasons, especially Paranoid, 1970, their second album (and second within a year) featuring three classic "heavy metal" songs with Geezer Butler's lyrics - one supportive of mental health problems, one discouraging drug-taking (especially heroin), and their best known which is an anti-war song specifically targeting the wars that politicians inflict on the rest of us:

"Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor"

uKanDanz covers War Pigs with Asnake Gebreyes singing in Amharic (brave guy):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kVYdLjoyPE

And then there's Ozzy Osbourne's anti-war Crazy Train, 1980, especially beloved in his native Birmingham. Live, 1981, with Randy Rhoades:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui79Uf817YA

"Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it's not too late
To learn how to love
And forget how to hate"

Current Location: Black Sabbath Bridge, Broad Street, Birmingham

rachelmanija

Camille is a tradwife influencer, living in near-total isolation from all humans but her awful and mostly absent husband Graham and her nosy neighbor Renee. She directs her own life like it's a perfect Instagram post, constantly obsessing over the perfect shade of beige and how her followers will react if she disagrees with a more successful tradwife influencer's insistence on a folic acid-free diet. The best way to get followers is to get pregnant, and she and Graham haven't managed that yet. But there's something lurking in the dark, deep well near the dark, deep woods that might be able to solve that problem for her.

The first quarter or so of this book is so repetitive and anvillicious that I might have DNF'd it if I hadn't been reading it for the horror book club. However, it picks up once Camille has sex with the creature in the well. (Camille tells herself it's an angel but can't stop calling it "the creature;" its actual nature is pleasingly ambiguous.) Her extremely weird pregnancy and increasingly desperate efforts to conceal its weirdnesses from Graham, Renee, and her online followers had me glued to the pages, and once her baby is born, I went from being entertained to actively loving the story. I don't want to give away too much about the baby, but I think it's the first time I have ever gotten deeply attached to a fictional baby. Of course, it helps that the baby isn't quite human...

The story is predictable but in a good way once you're past the interminable first quarter; you can't wait for certain things to happen. It gets increasingly batshit and darkly, gleefully funny as it goes along. It's a good female rage book, and has some quality monsterfucking scenes. Despite the rough start I really enjoyed this.

( Read more... )

Content notes: Very gory.

Incidentally, there are at least three novels called Trad Wife or Tradwife released this year. One by Sarah Langan is coming out in September.

kaberett

Reading. Preeeeetty much just progressing further through the She's A Beast archives, and continuing to develop opinions. I... think that's it? I think that's it; it has been A Busy Week.

Writing. Words Go Up: over 9.5k. Two more subsections titled. I continue to chew things over.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac. Technically up to May 2015, but I'm going to be going back over most of 2015 on account of Tragically, Some Dozing. (It is Car Noise, you see, and we have been. Travelling.)

Eating. A lot of food made for me by a variety of other people, notably including dosa + thali by Chai Station Chester, hot chocolate from [Knoops] in Chester, bread/cake/cookies/waffles by the Jaunty Goat and petits fours by Biscotti di Debora. Petits fours AMAZING; further thoughts possibly to follow.

Exploring. Southport Botanic Gardens, which struck me as much more of a park and rather less of a botanical garden than I'd quite expected based on the name, though perhaps this is because the fernery was closed by the time we got to it; very much enjoyed THE AVIARY.

Minimal exploration of Chester Zoo, once again culminating in staying in the bat cave until kicking out time.

Little bit of poking around Salisbury, feat. excellent tulips, excellent irises, FREE BLUE AGAPANTHUS that someone had divided, excellent bee doorknocker.

And then finally we made it HOME.

Making & mending. Progressed A's second glove some more! Stalled when I got to starting increases for the thumb gusset on account of my additional stitch markers were in the roof box and ... no.

Growing. Kept the lemongrass alive through The Travels. Acquired, as mentioned, a chunk of agapanthus. Unshockingly, the aubergine I sowed immediately before leaving has not sprouted, but hey, I'll turn the propagator back on. Nothing else seems to have died while I was away, hurrah.

Observing. MOON. The Dog. Creatures, including A having an excellent time Experiencing Bats (and also Flamingoes With Wings, A Rhinoceros, some grey-crowned cranes, and Monkeys).

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Style: Scratch the Surface 🐾 for Cutting Corners by roadrunnertwice

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Reading

Halfway through "What We Are Seeking"

VICTORY

some! good! things!

Seconds to Spare, by Rachel Reiss

... whoops

mrgh

In which there are Two Women, one woman, and a whole Patchwork of women

vital functions

Baked Beans for Breakfast AKA The Secret Summer, by Ruth Chew

some good things that have happened today

Bookpost: Falling Out of Cars, and several Shortbox 2025 comics

Nina Vakueva — Dream Loop (comics)

MIUWN — How to be a Good Human (comics)

Serena Cirillo — Joy (comics)

Mapurl — Injest (comics)

Asia Miller — Jubilee (comics)

Pupi — To Buy a Forest (comics)

Fortune's Fool, Tess Powel — The Last Wizard of Cwmdafi (comics)

Erin Roseberry — Fallen into the Garden (comics)

lilyresh — Flood Water Maiden (comics)

Jeff Noon — Falling Out of Cars

In which our heroine wishes a happy bunny-egg weekend to all who celebrate

Trad Wife, by Saratoga Schaefer

vital functions

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