OK, here we go — the final 2025 bookpost! And it's, uh, well, it's certainly something.

Daniel M. Ingram — Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (2nd ed.)

Feb. 25

Readable online. There’s also a pdf on the site, but I ended up downloading the html version and scrunching it into an epub. Here's that, if you want it. (Hopefully the author won't mind a little light format-shifting in the name of spreading information. If you meet the Buddha on the road, right-click him and save as.)

This one's been sitting unreviewed because there's a whole big context around it that is going to be kind of annoying to explain. I'll probably make a mess of it, but let's try.

A while back, right before the demise of Cohost, I read this all-time banger of a post by Matthew Seiji Burns. I want you to read it yourself, but basically:

Feeling better is possible. I mean in a baseline, day to day, non-temporary way. [...]

[...] I am going to describe a kind of meditation with a goal to make a specific “thing” happen, because the thing I’m about to describe was the single best improvement to my mental health that I ever experienced. I think it’s important for more people to know about. It is totally achievable— not exactly easy, but not ridiculously hard either. It employs meditation not as an open-ended and never-ending practice, but as a specific, targeted activity. Perhaps surprisingly, you do not need to keep meditating afterward to continue to have the benefit it confers.

And then he gives you the recipe.

( This goes on for a little while, and maybe not everyone wants to hear about my adventures in, uh, let's say "experimental philosophy," so better throw in a cut tag. )

Alison Bechdel — The Secret to Superhuman Strength (comics)

Dec. 25

And then there's the last two reviews of the year, which, due to their content, are somewhat easier to write now that I've written all that context just north of here.

As coincidence would have it, Alison Bechdel's most recent book is all about her lifelong hunger to escape the illusory prison of the self. The framing lens this time around is that she's writing about "exercise," but you know how it goes with these weird spiral-shaped memoirs of hers: she's actually writing about more or less everything, and rummaging through literary history in search of signposts and cairns from people who might have been on this trail before her.

I really like this loose trilogy of autobiographies. Bechdel has this sort of frantic, vibrating intelligence, and these books feel like spending a series of pleasant late nights with her during some period where she's almost-but-not-quite gotten her train of thought under control and can spin out the entire spirograph mandala shape for someone who happens to be on her wavelength. Powerful ADHD friends energy, basically.

Anyway, a recurring thread through this one, both explicitly discussed and arising from things she just depicts happening, is that she very much is on the same hunt as I've found myself: the quest to dissolve some boundaries between the self and the universe, and also to stop fucking hitting yourself with these goddamn illusions.

She also, and I wasn't expecting this, made a case that I should go back and read The Dharma Bums, even though I figured I was done with Kerouac. I'm not sure I'll be able to see what she saw in it; it seems likely situational. But maybe worth a try.

Bonus Level: Slay the Princess

Nov. ??

(Content warning: horror game with lots of murder and some gore.)

I'm still cleaning up some of the weirder inner routes that I haven't seen yet, but I think I've done enough full loops and endings that I can say I've played this game. And: it rules.

As I think I've mentioned before, I've had a kind of standoffish relationship with the video game genre called "visual novels". The default point of view for a very large swath of the format seems to be the blank-slate "self-insert" character (this is very much a legacy of the dominant "dating sim" sub-genre of VNs), and somehow something about that kind of repels me? Like, it's meant to be "me," but my agency is constrained to often prevent doing what "I" would actually do? And also, deliberately choosing things foreign to what I would do feels much weirder and grosser with a self-insert stand-in. We always kind of half-inhabit characters in a story, that's much of the point, but I prefer having a more depicted personality as an initial scaffold to hang my imaginings on; even in a CRPG with a blank slate protagonist, you usually go through a formal scaffolding process of building out their appearance and history and capabilities, which goes a long way toward making a more usable vessel for imagined choices.

This is very much an inconsistent reaction; I'm sure you wouldn't have to look hard to find something I like a lot that gives the lie to that as a general principle. But nevertheless, there it is! It's meant I've always held the genre at arms-length a bit, and despite having enjoyed several VNs in the past, I've still been kind of waiting to "get it."

I think Slay the Princess has helped me get VNs a little more! To start with, it quickly becomes clear that the protagonist is extremely separate from the player (and in many ways separate from their own self, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here), so that gets my aforementioned self-insert gag reflex out of the way.

For another thing: the actual gameplay of a VN consists of exploring what is ultimately a static tree structure, and since the branchings are one-way gates, this requires repeated runs. StP weaves these repetitions into the story itself, with two layers of epicyclic repetitions on top of the non-diegetic new-game repetitions. (The innermost loop starts when you're on a path in the woods, and the middle loop ends when you [REDACTED] a vessel to [REDACTED].) This isn't a generalizable technique, it really only works for this specific story, but that's a big part of why the game is so good — the balanced harmony of a story and a gameplay structure that feel made for each other. And the nested repetitions give this illusion of dynamism to the tree structure — your next pass on the innermost loop is profoundly affected by what you did on the last one, with the Princess's protean nature drastically mutated to match the protagonist's revealed personality. Anyway — that harmony helped make the VN tree-traversal gameplay fun for me in a way it hadn't really been before.

The other big part of why the game is so good is just that the art and writing are stellar. Abby Howard is an outstanding cartoonist; I know she's a good writer as well, so it's harder to pick out precisely what her husband Tony contributed, but I consider this a cut above her solo work, so he's doing something in there. There's some killer lines in this that continue to live in my head rent-free. (Solitary lights in an empty city...)

I kind of want to be careful about saying too much about the story, because it's one of those ones where the joy of discovery plays a big part. But: since I already knew the gimmick was a powerful one, I went in prepared for it to be more gimmicky than heartfelt. It was not. There's genuinely a lot going on in here, thematically and dramatically. Including, well... I guess, once you get to the late-game outermost loop scene where the narrator finally plays fair with you, you'll see why I'm lumping this game into this batch of reviews. (And if you traverse to the weird "happily ever after" inner-loop path, you'll see it even more.)

It's coming up on the end of 2025, so let's do a couple review posts.

Cameron Reed — The Fortunate Fall

Apr. 10

Holy shit what a ride.

Newly back in print after a long period of unavailability, this landmark work by the author of a favorite short story was brought to my attention with a link to an old Jo Walton review of it. Walton is a superior book reviewer, so maybe I should just tell you to close my tab and read her; certainly she made a watertight case that I needed to read this book immediately.

This is a 30-year-old science fiction book that feels new. It’s intense and paranoid and smart and scary. I bought a copy after reading it because I predicted needing to both re-read it and loan it out.

The author has another novel coming out in I think April, and I’m in, sight unseen.

Bonus Level: Persona 3 Reload

May 3

Persona 3 seems to have been the game where Atlus really nailed down their winning formula for the series, which they've been refining ever since. It's also the only one of the three modern main-line games that I hadn't played. And how convenient, they just released a remake of it last year!

With regard to remakes: This era sometimes seems like it would prefer to give us nothing but, and in general I would say I have negative feelings about that. But in this specific case, the brief seems to have been “the dramatic presentation ain’t broken, but let’s match P5’s battle system and visuals,” and frankly I’m on board. P5’s contributions to the state of the turn-based art were not small, and I was happy to pay a bit of a premium to experience a classic story I missed out on with like a solid 50% less slog. (That said, if you already DID play P3 a couple times on the PS2, I would expect that this is completely inessential. Having played P4 Golden a few years back, I have no plans to fuck with the upcoming P4 remake.)

Wow, I’m committing some circumvegetal battery today, aren’t I. Anyway, I enjoyed this a LOT. The characters were superb, the plot was twisty and satisfying, and it had that classic Persona balance of engrossing life-sim loop and risk-hungry dungeon crawling.

All three of these games have some strong point that raises them above the others. P5’s hand-crafted story dungeons and rotating cast of menacing-yet-pathetic villains are SO motivating, and feel decades more advanced than the abstract threats and surprise big-bads of 3 and 4. In P4, the narrative/mechanical harmony of your party members literally confronting their shadow to unlock their powers is the best version of the “Persona” conceit around, and binds your party together in purpose just as well as P5’s superior villainy does; possibly better. In P3, I think the rifts and tensions within the party might be the star of the show. The setting of the game is dark and paranoid, and that paranoia seeps into your own people in insidious ways. The struggle to trust and protect each other despite that is the thematic core of this one, and it remains solid and resonant.

I played this with the Japanese voice cast (the English cast are very good, but sometimes it’s nice to get a bit of listening practice anyway), and there were a couple of standout performances. Well, mostly I mean Yukari. She’s my fave in general, but there are a couple of scenes where she has some emotionally raw material and just kills with it. (She’s the one I had my protagonist ask out, because obviously, and the climactic scene of that path really sticks with me.) Also, honorable mention to your homeroom teacher; most of the game she’s just wry and funny and above it all, but there is ONE scene with her after the final battle that only appears if you complete a particular social link, and it is just about the funniest shit I have EVER heard in a video game. We’re talking severe stomach pain.

Bonus Level: Persona 3 Reload: Episode Aigis

Nov 21

This is a ~$30 optional DLC. I enjoyed some things about it, but it’s flawed and inessential, and I don’t know that I’d recommend it, even if you loved the main game.

First off: it’s a continuation of the main game’s story, but that story didn’t need continuation; it already ends at the correct moment. This also relies on some pretty random contrivances to provoke its conflicts. I see it more as an ok what-if fanfic than as a properly canonical coda. (I had been hoping for a bit more backstory on the original shadow research from before we all got here, but no dice; it’s all looking back at more recent trauma.)

Secondly, and more frustratingly: it lacks all of P3’s life sim elements. It’s just the dungeon-crawling and shopping. So you’ve effectively got half the gameplay of a main-line Persona game, and the dungeoning gets tedious without the social calendar to space it out and contextualize it.

Ryoko Kui — Delicious in Dungeon vols. 1-14 (completed) (comics)

Jul. 31

What a tremendous comic! There’s so much there there, thematically and dramatically. I think I already told you this was an all-timer when I was 2/3 through it, and it very much stuck the landing. And it’s so, so funny, between all the world-at-stake drama. You should read this. (I actually bought the whole run, which I won’t normally do with a manga these days.)

Here is something load-bearing in the story that I don’t think I’ve seen talked about much: the way the Winged Lion is so beautiful. My boi is the prettiest kitty. He just like, glows, with a pure inner light of kindness, such that even when you’re starting to get onto his tricks you still kinda want to believe him.

I think the parallel with Aslan must be intentional, and feels like part of a comprehensive Buddhist critique of Christian conceptions of divinity, permanence, and the possibility of satisfying desire. (I may have mentioned the thematic density??)

Sure, why not, let's bookpost.

Wren Hyde — Beneath a Burning Sky (zine)

Feb 27

A friend we know from Ruth's shapenote singing community wrote a zine about going on long bike tours. It's good! Wren generally puts a lot of energy into thinking about things like the practical exercise of freedom and the purpose of risking yourself on an adventure, and I always value the sense of being gently shaken out of autopilot that I get from talking to (or reading) them.

I don't know of anywhere a random person could obtain this from, but it's worth picking up if you happen to see it around.

Ken Liu — Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Translation for a Transformative Time

Mar. 30

(For now I’m putting Liu as the author here rather than Laozi, but I might reconsider at some point. He has a lot of commentary in his own voice interspersed throughout the book (on the Dao, on other Daoist writers, on the theory and practice of translation), so it’s not attempting to be an invisible translation.)

I picked this up because the ebook was on steep sale. My only real prior familiarity with this text was indirect, through the prints it leaves on the surrounding world, and those prints are ambiguous and elusive. Well... the text is also ambiguous and elusive. Even more so than I was expecting, and that’s saying something! Having carefully read it, I do not feel equipped to tell you what I think Daoism is about. Ask me in some later year, maybe.

I’m glad I read this and I expect to return to it. It’s deliberately aggravating and provocative, but in a gentle way. I really had no idea what to think of it right after finishing, but there are one or two ideas in there that have yielded a bit more as I mull them over in the background. (In particular, some paradoxes about the entire concept of “leading.”)

J.-C. Mézières, P. Christin, E. Tranlé — Valerian and Laureline: The Empire of a Thousand Planets and The Land Without Stars (comics)

Apr. 14

This long-running French sci-fi comic series came up in a conversation about The Fifth Element; I hadn't really heard of it, but it's apparently widely influential. The library had a bunch of it, so I checked out a couple volumes.

The art and the environment design in these is fabulous. But I found the stories a bit tedious and slight, and the cartooning (as distinct from the superb draftsmanship and composition) wasn't to my taste, so I don't expect to read much more of it.

This is that style of comic where the panels are lushly and meticulously detailed, but there aren't enough of them to properly control the narrative flow, and so they compensate by cramming a goddamn paragraph of captions above every other panel. My personal name for this phenomenon is "That Prince Valiant Thing," in honor of a baffling Sunday newspaper strip from my childhood that always seemed to have like one panel of dudes staring into space and a half-page of turgid narration in which absolutely nothing ever happened. I'm sure there's people who like this (or at least are better able to tolerate it), but I personally feel that it misses the point of the medium.

Tamsyn Muir — Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

Apr. 10

I loved this gory inverted fairy tale about a self-made monster.

This novella has an extremely good Shape, and I wish I could define that better for you. I've had an ongoing background ponder running for years about what exactly the novella as a form is good for, and my current (tentative) thinking is that it's either for episodic stories, or for stories where you're trying to draw a very particular geometric structure with the plot (which requires more elbow room than a short, but which will have less success in a longer novel because it's harder for the reader to hold the whole of the shape in their head at once). The failure states for the novella are, of course, "short story that wasn't cut enough" and "novel with insufficient development."

Well, uh, everything is pretty fucked up right now, buuuut I feel like I'm not going to benefit the dozen or two people who read this journal by hollering about it. But I can at least validate your parking: the amount of cruelty, greed, and chaos in America right now is absolutely off the chain, and if you're feeling stressed about it, IMO that's rational and normal. I don't have anything to suggest that you haven't already heard, tho.

What I DO have that you haven't heard are some recs of rad stuff to read, so that's what I'll go ahead and post.

Sylvan Migdal — Carboniferous (comics)

May 17, 2024

Readable online!

This (completed, GN-sized) sci-fi comedy webcomic is an order of magnitude smarter than it looks, while still being exactly as fun as it looks. A squishy galactic federation nepo-baby blunders into a backwater lost-colony planet and instantly re-inflames a botched first-contact detente, an infinite number of local power struggles, and a weirdly lethal AR game that no one remembers signing up for.

I almost never saw anyone talking about this one, and I think it's heinously underrated! Peak webcomics, tbh!

Heads-up for workplace comic-readers: this series is perfectly SFW, but it shares a domain with a whole bunch of good-natured porn by the same author, so be careful where ya click.

Zito Madu — The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

Nov. 13, 2024

A mostly realistic memoir with a lone surreal episode. A brutal practice of self-knowledge? Traveling “wrong” in order to claim a place more thoroughly? The meaning of labyrinth for its denizen?

^^ That was meant as notes for a later expanded review, but on reflection I don’t think they can be improved, so I present them as-is. No refunds.

Valerie Halla — Curse/Kiss/Cute, episode 0

Jan 27, 2025

Readable Online!

If you do everything I tell you to as a matter of sensible policy, then you may remember Valerie Halla as the cartoonist of Goodbye to Halos, a gentle and queer fantasy webcomic that looked fresh to death, seemed like it wanted to go somewhere real exciting but didn’t quite know the way yet, and eventually ran aground and wiped out. (By the way, a halted-unfinished webcomic is never a true failure, in my book. It was always worth sharing that thing shouting from your heart, and for us it was always worth watching. Every wipeout expands the possibility space and teaches us something new to want.) You might also be aware that she was the colorist on the last 1/4 or so of Octopus Pie, speaking of looking fresh to death.

This is not a comic; it’s the “pilot episode” of a horny urban fantasy illustrated prose serial. But formally speaking, it does a couple real interesting things that draw from the modern English-language strain of “visual novel” video games, which in turn are heavily influenced by the formal/narrative tendencies of 00’s–10’s webcomics. So it’s not a hard break, if you get me.

Ok, listen: it feels a little risky to push this on even my treasured gayer-than-baseline readership. It is ever so slightly closer to the furry lane of the freeway than most people vibe with, and it’s not porn but it is kinda rowdy and rude. But I formally recommend that every one of you take a chance on it anyway, because!

ITEM 1: It’s plain fucking good!! It’s witty and sly and cute, the characters are fun as hell, the prose is a delight, and I love the illustrations.

ITEM 2: It’s formally interesting! Give that sound-cue feature a try, see what it does to the scrolling-fiction experience and see what it makes you feel. IMO it’s part of a unified whole with the distracted and evasive narrative voice, contributing to a particular ludo-mechanical reading experience that feels fresh and raw.

ITEM 3: In its own soft and oblique way, this might actually be the most inherently and irreducibly transgender thing I’ve ever read, and IMO that is good and urgent and intensely exciting all on its own. The central themes of “monstrosity” and self-answering questions are incredibly potent, and the whole thing is suffused with the joy of expanding possibilities and the removal of constraints. I trust you to already know why someone might be desperately thirsty for that in this present historical moment; I'd like to suggest that maybe you'd benefit from it too, even if you weren't actively looking for it prior to reading this.

Sarah Webb — Kochab (comics, re-read)

Feb 10, 2025

(readable online! Or, grab the book.)

Previously reviewed, this is a standalone (web-serialized) graphic novel about a free-spirited village girl and an immortal ifrit imprisoned by her own memories (girl-by-force-of-will) who tentatively fall in love while traversing the wreckage of a dead arcology-palace in the arctic.

This re-read was via the beautiful Hiveworks paperback edition that kickstarted a while back. The story benefits greatly from the collected format; I remembered it feeling a bit circular and oblique during the middle, but it turns out that was just the serialization delay, and everything feels clear and speedy without it.

Anyway, I love this comic.

Another batch of reviews. And!! Finally!!!! The last crumbs of the 2023 backlog! 🙌🏼

Bonus Level: Cosmo D — Tales from Off Peak City, vol. 1

Nov. 11, 2023

Hahaha oh my god this ruled.

This is a berserk free-jazz shitpost of a game. It's a first-person walk n talk with charmingly gross graphics, some really nice uses of dynamic musical soundscapes (important objects mutate the music when you approach!), an intricate pizza-making minigame, and a surreal story about androids and mind control. I named my character "Yonkers."

Anyway, watch the trailer — this game is exactly what it looks like (positive).

Martha Wells — Witch King (reread)

Jan. 2, 2024

I just recently reviewed this, so nothing new to say.

Martha Wells — System Collapse (Murderbot #7)

Nov. 22, 2023

This was great.

Plot-wise, it directly follows Network Effect, with everyone still figuring out how to extricate themselves from the planet and ART's crew working together with the Preservation gang.

Character-wise, this is maybe low-key the big one! The climax is such a big turning point in Murderbot's sense of self and conception of agency!

This is maybe an esoteric way to say this, but I feel like this is the Finder: Talisman of the Murderbot series. If you know, you know.

Ada Hoffman — The Outside

Feb. 23, 2024

This was decent, and had an intriguing spacefaring take on Lovecraftian cosmic horror. I liked it enough to finish it, but probably not enough to read the following books in the series.

qntm — Ra

June 17, 2024

Readable online.

This was really good! And had an incredibly pessimistic (but very satisfying) ending.

It starts off as a meandering and curious exploration of a world that very much resembles our own, except that magic is a real branch of physical science that was discovered in 1972. And then it Fucking Goes Places. Gonzo hard SF with a dizzying scope.

Bonus Level: Anthology of the Killer

Jul 14, 2024

This rules. It's a compilation of nine short comedy/horror walk-and-talk games, about a zine-writing gal trying to get by in the city (and having to constantly evade serial killers). The art is delightfully rough and scrappy. The camera behavior is comically bad, possibly on purpose. The writing is brilliant and hilarious and surreal. This is a game where an antagonist says:

I realized that we needed to go back, to rejoin that sacred continuity of force, severed from us by revolutionary turmoil.

Back to violence sanctified by myth, when one could be a Gilles de Rais upon a holy quest instead of just some asshole strangling kids in the parking lot behind the Stop 'n' Go.

And where, under totally unrelated circumstances, the protagonist/narrators say:

"A tasteful plaque acknowledges tax-deductible charity donations from the Zacklerz, of opioid industry fame. Wait, that can't be right. Zacklerz?"

"They changed their name to seem relatable to younger juries."

The first two games are a little rougher than the others; in my opinion, Drool of the Killer is where it really started firing on all cylinders.

Most of the games take a single sitting, maybe 30-40m; my routine was to play one in the evening as I was winding down for the night. (The last one is longer, but it lets you resume from the act breaks.)

Ann Leckie — The Raven Tower (re-read)

July 31, 2023

Hey guess what, read the fuckin Raven Tower. This must be the third or fourth time I've read it and it's 100% as good every time. My favorite Hamlet riff combined with the triumph of the World's Strongest Spinny Rock.

Graydon Saunders — Under One Banner (re-read)

Aug. 5, 2023

Hey guess what, the Commonweal series is still some extremely good strange fantasy. This is the one about a scholar who built their personality around doing fiddly stuff with material science, but is coming to realize their true calling is maybe in horrible violence instead.

Graydon Saunders — A Mist of Grit and Splinters (re-read)

Aug. 21, 2023

Once I re-read book 4, I kind of just rolled into book 5.

Martha Wells — Between Worlds: The Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories

May 10, 2024

I think only a couple of you have read the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, but anyway, Ile-Rien was also the setting of two of Wells' earlier books, and Cineth is the other main setting in that final trilogy.

The thing about Ile-Rien as a setting is that it's kind of inconsistent and busted, and the stories set there work in spite of it, not because of it. There's reliable scholastic magic that operates as basically a branch of physical science, but then there's also literally the Fae... and then there's also real-world technology based on physical science (gaslight, gunpowder, steam engines and steel railways and ocean liners), but it doesn't cross-breed at all with the equally scientific scholastic magic. And then there's distinctly Christian-flavored religion in the background in various places (largely ignored by the main characters and doctrine wholly unclear), but if there's no Judaism and no Rome in the setting, then why's it shaped that way? Etc. etc.

Ile-Rien is a hodgepodge, is what I'm getting at. My read is that she had things she wanted her characters to do, and spaces she wanted them to move through, and she threw stock elements into the setting as needed to enable that. Fair enough!

Cineth, on the other hand, feels solid. I fucking love Cineth. Everything in that setting (the lifestyles, the technologies, the family structures, the gods and magic, the cultural conflicts) feels much more organically intertwined, standing toe-to-toe with the settings of Wells' later works. So, I see the trilogy as sort of the key bridge work between her early and later novels, and it's kind of funnily symbolic of that when Tremaine from Rien decides to stay in Cineth at the end.

Wow, what a massive digression that was! Anyway, this is a collection of short stories about existing characters from Wells' novels — one story for Kade Carrion, one for Nicholas Valiarde and Reynard Moraine, and four for the boys from Cineth.

As I might have mentioned before, I think the novel is Wells' natural format; her short stories aren't especially notable on their own, but they can work really well when she's using them to add more depth to characters she's already rounded out at novel-length elsewhere. Which is exactly what's on offer here, in the four Cineth stories. Actually, that one about what originally happened to Ilias is kind of haunting me; I thought that story was great, mostly for the way it refused to dress up an unforgivable crime with any tidy answers or closure.

(The Kade and Nicholas/Reynard stories are more just about dusting those characters off and taking them out for a short romp; fun enough, but they won't stick in my memory.)

So tl;dr, read this collection if you like those wizard-huntin' boys from the Fall trilogy, who are basically my faves. 👍🏼

I've got a pile of reviews in the hopper from the past year or so, so I'm kind of shuffling the chronology to come up with nice "optimum handful of trail mix" posts. Anyway, here's a book I just finished plus a few things from last year.

Alaya Dawn Johnson — The Library of Broken Worlds

June 7, 2024

Holy shit this was good. I got it from the library after watching Ruth’s reactions to it in real time, and was not disappointed.

This book seems to be packaged as romantic YA SF. Don’t fucking believe it! Much in the spirit of the book’s own themes and preoccupations, that is a kernel of truth fueling a massive misdirection. This is psychedelic SF of the highest intellectual potency. Ruth said it reminded her of a mix of the Locked Tomb books and the good parts of Garth Nix’s Lirael. I’d also compare it to Jeff Noon’s Virt, Slone Leong’s Prism Stalker, and maybe that last part of Kalpa Imperial where time finally collapses entirely and it turns into the Iliad but with everyone’s face replaced by tenth-generation photocopied glamor shots of early 20th century Hollywood stars.

It’s an exciting story with superb momentum, but it also demands some significant work to keep up with the action — you are expected to continually devise and test your own explanations for things that are deliberately left underexplained, which feels a bit like sprinting at 40mph to keep up with a car so you can carry on a conversation through the rolled-down window. I found it very rewarding!

...This one time, at a reading we attended, Kelly Link was asked to define the “young adult” “genre” within the artistic domain of genre traits (as opposed to the strictly commercial domain of market segmentation). Her answer was that a YA story absolutely must be about a person doing something (probably several things) for the first time. That’s pretty squiggly and porous, but I feel like it does actually get to the core of something useful. If you stand there and squint, then yeah, The Library of Broken Worlds' core thematic and emotional concerns absolutely situate it in YA. It's just that the reading experience is wildly perpendicular to what you'd expect if you went out looking for some YA to read. For a fun illustration of this, go check out the wave of confused and dismayed reviews on the book's Goodreads page.

Amaduyu Tatsuki, Mitsumi Misato, Wakaki Tamiki — 16-bit Sensation (comics)

Nov 24, 2023

A fun little fictionalized memoir about... makin' porno video games in 1990s Japan.

What I thought was most interesting about this was its focus on the texture of the period technology. Honestly I learned a lot about the pre-Windows Japanese PC ecosystem (like, the pc98 and friends), both from the text and from the bit of research I did after it piqued my curiosity.

Laurie J. Marks — Dancing Jack

July 18, 2023

An earlier work by the author of the Elemental Logic series. (1993, and only recently back (?) in print as an ebook.) I greatly enjoyed this.

You can see some of Elemental Logic’s preoccupations making themselves known ahead of time here: squirrelly and symbolic magics, the flash of insight as story-derailing superweapon, curses inflicted by an alliance of your enemies and your inner doubts, redemptions and second acts, bein’ generally just gay as hell.

There's a particular spell in the story woven around the titular dancing jack, and its nature is acknowledged but never explicitly identified. I had some kind of summary of it in my head soon after reading this, developed as I was backpacking, and I neglected to write it down. But I think it had something to do with cutting you free from the illusory obligations of sunk costs and self-image, or inflicting a knowledge of how wide a range of choices you actually still have. Nightmare-tier power level tbh. Just imagine.

Bonus Level: Sea of Stars

Oct. something, 2023

I loved the traversal and combat and aesthetics in this game, but the story and character writing left me cold. The heroes were just too abstract, you know? I played both demos and had high hopes, because in that short format they gave off a vibe of two people who've known each other for a really long time and who get along really well and support each other, and I feel like that's a dynamic that's underexplored in RPGs. But they didn't turn out to have a whole lot in the way of preferences or inner life, alas. Same for most of the rest of the cast.

Well: okay, actually there's one bit of character writing I really liked —

(END GAME SPOILERS AHEAD.)

( Read more... )

I've still got a backlog of 2023 reviews to write, so for the next little while I'm gonna end up breaking the boundary and posting a mix of stuff from this year and last year.

( Three book reviews and two video games )

Tamsyn Muir — Gideon the Ninth

Jan. 10

This book is amazing.

Like with most fiction lately, it took me a little while to get properly into it, but at a certain point it grabbed onto me for real and I blazed through the rest. (Had the same experience on my late-2022 re-read.)

The reviews I've seen for this were pretty polarized, and the primary split seems to be on whether you can stomach 1. highly stylized and anti-naturalistic dialogue that 2. operates on levels other than or in addition to what seem to be the literal circumstances of the setting and 3. is also used in the service of comedy. At least, that's how someone who loved the book would describe the split; if you hated it, you'd probably describe the bone of contention as obnoxiously self-conscious post-Homestuck memelord bullshit. But I, as I may have mentioned earlier, did in fact love it, and I found its use of language playful and a delight. The dialogue snaps, and it serves its story superbly.

In addition to really liking the character dynamics, I also want to give a big shout-out to the setting -- a grieviously damaged undead solar system sloshing with mystery, chaos, and menace.

Anyway, IMO this is a must-read fantasy adventure.

Tamsyn Muir — Harrow the Ninth

Jan. 11

I dropped into this right after finishing Gideon and smashed through it in like two days. It is also good -- actually, if anything, it's much better.

On the worldbuilding and overarching plot front, it answers a ton of baffling questions that dangled off the end of the first book, while simultaneously raising like three other much more troubling questions for each one it ties off.

On the character dynamics and relationships front, I think this book used a formally adventurous and confrontational structure to say legitimately fresh and interesting things about grief, memory, and the ways we engage with fiction.

Also, I quite liked all those unbelievable assholes aboard the imperial flagship.

I'm greatly looking forward to the last two books in this series.

Hiromu Arakawa — Silver Spoon 13 & 14 (comics)

June 17

I can’t remember what I would have said about these two volumes in particular, but it’s a great series and I need to finally go get the last of it from the library.

John M. Ford — The Dragon Waiting

Aug. 17

What the fuck!!!

This book was a really remarkable achievement on a whole lot of levels at once, including levels I’m simply not well-read enough or clever enough to say anything useful about. Ford was truly on another tier, and I can see why this was considered a lost classic. (It’s not lost anymore, btw! It got a reprint like two years back! Though, the ’80s paperback cover I own is vastly superior to the new hardback one.)

This is an engaging and surprising fantasy novel that does really strange things with history and then doesn’t really say anything out loud for the first 3/4 of the story about the stuff it fucked with. It’s sort of mostly about vampires? Vampirism ends up being the hinge of the plot. It’s also sort of mostly about imperialism. And it’s also about magic, but the threads that are about magic are also about futility. Also it’s all about Richard III.

It’s all over the place, and it’s really good.

Katie Mack — The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)

Sept. 8

I was in A Mood and some acknowledgement of cosmic doom was exactly the business. Anyway Mack is a good popular science writer, you’ve seen her tweets and stuff, throw this on your library catalog stack of pop nonfiction for when you’re in A Mood.

Got a handful of reviews sitting in the bin, so let's do a bookpost!

( Seven game/comic/book reviews )