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."

Ah right, since I've got all the reviews (but one) posted, may as well do the wrap-up:

• 9 fiction:
  • 2 by men
  • 7 by women
  • 2 re-reads, 7 new
• 16 comics:
  • 8 by men
  • 7 by women
  • 1 by non-binaries
• 5 video games with significant narratives

Not exactly a red-letter reading year! But, some slightly interesting trends:

• Significantly more comics than in the prior five years.
• Prose fiction is down from 2023, but oddly, the amount of novels I read for the first time is stable (and up from prior years).

Bonus Level: A Hand With Many Fingers

July 6, 2024

A short and satisfying card-catalogue-em-up about a real-world CIA conspiracy. Only takes a couple hours to play. I think the gameplay is fundamentally the same concept as Her Story, except walking around to fetch print fragments from file boxes instead of driving a search box to find video fragments in a computer.

Meredeth Gran — Octopus Pie Eternal (comics)

July 15

Read it online

A SECOND unexpected Octopus Pie epilogue, also dropped all in one go!!! God, we’re too lucky. Anyway, this was funny, touching, and at times hair-raising. Outlandishly good shit.

Rosemary Valero-O’Connell — Don’t Go Without Me (comics)

Aug. 2

If you can obtain this book, do so. Three short stories with exquisite pacing, expressive environment design, precise character work, and prophetic narrative voice.

Every once in a while there’s a book where you put it down and just say: “Damn! Comics!!!!!”

(The middle story in this collection, “What is Left,” was previously published as a standalone, which I might have previously reviewed.)

Martha Wells — System Collapse (Murderbot 7) (re-read))

July 23

This is still good, but I reviewed it just recently.

Bonus Level: Sylvie RPG: 7 Elf Apocalypse

Aug 3

First thing I said when I heard about this game was “wow, I bet I’m gonna learn a bunch of new shit about the theory of bump combat.” Reader, my gift of prophesy remains unmatched. Also I think I'm a Sylvie fan now.

Play this! It's free and fun and interesting. And kind of hard. And extremely silly.

Anyway, the thing about "bump combat" is that it requires some form of asymmetry. Early Ys did wonky things with hitbox centering that I found more intriguing than satisfying. Sylvie cracked the code more thoroughly: only the player deals mêlée damage on contact, and enemies use telegraphed projectiles instead. This works great! It doesn't serve the same goals as Ys had, because it actually clamps down on momentum quite a bit — instead of efficiently bulldozing, you're trying to dodge, parry, and riposte to protect your scarce HP. It really amplifies the flavor of being the one two-fisted meathead going up against a world of ethereal elves and fairies!

The cramped arenas and the asymmetric threats make maneuvers very challenging, but the resulting combat feels very fair and highly tuned. Bonus points for a highly abstract but very clever and effective "active defense" mechanic.

Bonus Level: 13 Sentinels (re-play)

July 28

DAMN this game is still so good. I was sick with covid and wanted to just re-experience something nice (ideally on Switch so I had the option to play horizontally on the couch lol), so I fired it up and blazed through it in four or five days.

Although the first-time experience of the story's twists and turns is unparalleled, I think it also really rewards a re-read! It was fun to look for early clues of things I knew were coming, and actually it still took a lot of mental work to establish the ordering and causation of certain events, even with all my pre-loaded context.

Also, you know that semi-endless sequence of postgame battle missions with the unfair difficulty level? Well, I played an amount of them that I am unwilling to admit to, and I'm here to report that it eventually hits a degenerate state. Remember how some kaiju units get "ceramic armor" that rejects all sub-300-HP hits, and it disables your best damage sources? Well, you can upgrade your G1s enough that their demolisher blade crosses that 300-per-hit mark (this happens earlier than you'd think, if you're taking their limiters off), and the game's basically solved. You just send two gorillas sprinting around the map with angle grinders, and have one or two other teens hang back at the terminal with a shield matrix and some area weapons for the riff-raff. Maybe if you get bored you can have Fuyusaka stick some guys in the microwave.

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... )

Right, here goes: the last didread post of 2022!

Bonus Level: Chicory

Oct 2

This cozy nonviolent Zelda-alike about cartoon animals with food names went WAY harder than I expected it to. It’s actually a fairly raw meditation on fame, societal expectations, self-expectations, the myth of the artist vs. the messy reality of the creative drive, professional jealousy and mentors who violate trust, early hyper-specialization and how it corrodes your sense of self into a brittle crust, and some other Real Live Shit.

Man, also, the (optional, and basically nonjudgmental) artistic challenges in this game kinda pushed me out of my comfort zone. Drawing is already hard and soul-bruising, and the primitive controls they give you to work with would preclude doing a “nice” job even if you draw a lot better than me! Good emotional strength-training. 😅

Anyway, this was a good game and a cool experience.

Tim Probert — Lightfall, Book One: The Girl and the Galudrian (comics)

Oct 4

A remarkably good kids’ fantasy adventure comic, in a very post-Amulet vein. The storytelling is solid, and the cartooning is really top-notch. Excellent uses of space and size to control time and intensity, and some really flexible, engaging, and expressive character work.

I got this for my nephew’s bday and read the whole thing before gift-wrapping it.

Bonus Level: Noise1

Dec. ?

(itch.io store page)

A weird experimental terminal-based stealth game, about two lovers trying to escape a nightmarish human(?) experimentation facility.

This was a nice concise experience (three or four half-hour sittings, maybe), and really cool from a design perspective. I'm honestly amazed at how well the core tenets of stealth action translated to a command-line interface.

Bonus Level: ZeroRanger

Dec. 21

This game is amazing! I was NOT expecting to get obsessed with an old-school vertically-scrolling shmup this year, but wow.

It's a labor of love from a tiny dev team, and it exudes an amazing amount of polish; the look, sound, and feel of it are all top-notch. And it's got a surprising amount of story and mystery to it! Even though it's structured like a stateless arcade game, there's a bunch of events, surprises, and changes that you only see once on a given save file.

It's hard but satisfying and fair. I played through to the true ending, and then got all the achievements in the shorter White Vanilla mode. Supposedly there's a third game mode under development, so once that drops I'll probably reset my save file and try and get good again.

Bonus Level: Ys I & II

Dec 28

These classic action RPGs are a matched set; act I ends on a cliffhanger and act II closes out the story. They've been remastered and re-released uncountable times, and I remember back in my video game message board days there were a couple people who considered the TurboCD version an underrated masterpiece. I'd never played em until now.

They're decent! I wouldn't recommend them to everyone; they hew to another era's measure of what's fair play, so it's easy to miss critical items, get pointlessly lost or stuck, or just find yourself underleveled for a boss with no recourse but to grind. They also seem to be a weird offshoot from the main trunk of action RPG evolution; there are some odd ideas in here that still feel new just because no one else went that way, and some of them work better than others. But I enjoyed them more than enough to finish them! I'd recommend them if you're a curious student of the action RPG form, or if you just want to play a cool old game and are fine with hitting a FAQ when you get stuck. The story is spare but perfectly serviceable, the atmosphere is cool, the pixel art in the current crop of remasters (vintage 2005) is lovely, and the mechanical oddities are genuinely really interesting.

The oddest bit of these games is the "bump system" combat, where instead of pressing a button to attack you just ram into the enemy. The hit resolution is asymmetric: if you hit the enemy square-on, you get hurt or trade damage, but if you hit them off-center, you're safe. I've never seen anything like this, and it's a really interesting and elegant idea! Much more fun than it seems at first. It's basically optimizing for keeping your momentum high while fighting a LOT of mooks with simple AI out in the field, and it does a really good job at that. I think Lilah was telling me a couple years back that CrossCode was one of the only games she'd seen that really seemed to have learnt about movement from Ys, and now I sort of see what she meant — it's totally about that sense of momentum in the field.

Unfortunately, its utility does NOT translate to large boss fights in enclosed rooms, and Ys I had some of the most boneheadedly frustrating boss fights I've ever met. In Ys II, the developers seem to have made the same diagnosis, because they give you some aimed fire magic that's rarely necessary out in the field and make almost all the bosses vulnerable to that and only that. This is a major improvement, but makes it so the bosses are effectively a different game than the field combat.

There's nothing else interesting happening today, so let's post some book and game reviews! 😅

( Several reviews, cut for length )

(* Well, first post of books I read in 2021. I posted some 2020 reviews back in March.)

A friend recently started reading Stand Still Stay Silent on my rec, then blasted past me and finished the whole thing while I was still poking along. (I'm only in like chapter 6. Here are my thoughts on SSSS: 1. The prologue is fucking dead-on about the speed things happen at in a real live pandemic, can't even believe it was posted in 2013 rather than yesterday. 2. Sigrun is brave, caring, resourceful, and dumber than a box of fukkin rocks, I love her.)

Anyway, said friend then asked if I had other recs, so I threw this together, and now that I think about it, no reason not to post it for everyone else too. Some of these I've recced before, some I have not (or it's been a while). On some of these, I link to start pages instead of homepages to avoid spoilers or be more convenient.

(Casual reminder that eardogger dot com is a cool way to mark your spot. 🐶)

Some completed stuff

• Bad Machinery - Top-quality mystery-solving preteens.
• A Redtail's Dream - Same cartoonist as Stand Still Stay Silent; this is the comic she did before that. I haven't read it yet.
• As the Crow Flies - (I think it's completed. I'm only partway through.) Tense awkwardness at a Christian summer camp for girls, and a tentative friendship between the only Black kid there and the only trans kid there.
• The Chairs' Hiatus - Hella feelings after the breakup of a cult-popular rock duo. I liked this.
• Decrypting Rita - Stylish, intentionally disorienting.
• Mare Internum - Set on Mars, incredible ecology design and art, assume basically all content warnings due to protagonist's nightmarishly bad mental health.
• Octopus Pie - Completed, but re-running several times a week with author commentary. Slice-of-life comedy/drama.

Some ongoing stuff

• Brainchild - Slow-burn supernatural suspense.
• Kochab - Quiet fantasy, gorgeous character/environment design and draftsmanship, some slow-burn romantic tension.
• Incredible Doom - Same cartoonist as Chairs' Hiatus. Haven't read this yet but it looks cool.
• Goodbye to Halos - Fantasy/action, extra-queer, with a low-key gentle worldview despite the occasionally traumatic state of its world.
• Night Physics - I think this is on semi-permanent hiatus, but it's not exactly plot-driven so it shouldn't abandon you on a cliffhanger. Incredible atmosphere.
• Barbarous - Modern/urban fantasy. One of my favorites right now.
• Necropolis - Sword gals. Incredible art.
• Oh Human Star - Protagonist is brought back from the dead into a near-future Minneapolis populated by a mix of humans and robots... and immediately has to confront all his old relationship issues and gender shit.
• Dicebox - An all-time fave. This is even more SF than you think it is. Be prepared to work, and also be prepared to have an excellent time.

I haven't bookposted about most of what I've read during the second half of the year. This is because I read all of Elemental Logic and Machineries of Empire in July and August, and I'm mildly intimidated by the task of saying something interesting about them. They're both incredible series that meant a lot to me, so I don't want to just post a dumb one-liner! Well, I will if I have to, but for now I'll let those marinate a little longer, maybe plink away at them over the holiday break.

In the meantime, here's a small handful:

Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh (colors JN Wiedle & Rachel Cohen) — Barbarous, ch. 1 and 2 (comics)

Nov 10

This ongoing webcomic is once again updating (with chapter... 5? I think), and also they're running a Kickstarter to print ch. 3, so I went back and read through my print copies of ch. 1 and 2.

This comic is excellent and I highly recommend it. Chapter 1 is admittedly a little odd; I remember thinking a lot of the interpersonal drama seemed unreasonably bombastic, and that it kind of came out of nowhere. But re-reading it with knowledge of what comes later, I feel like the conflicts actually make sense and are correctly proportioned. Just gotta have faith!! And/or not be reading it at two pages per week.

Man, these print editions are some gorgeous books. They're these massively oversized perfect-bound things, but super skinny, a format that reminds me of some French comics. I don't really know how well these sell; the Kickstarters always blast through their number, but woof, they're certainly priced like there's zero economy of scale.

I'll be buying the whole series anyway, despite wincing at the price; the art just fuckin' sings at this size. But if you're not as devoted to these authors as I am, you might want to just read the webcomic and/or wait for the inevitable one-volume edition.

Vandana Singh — Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories

Sept. 6

This short story collection was excellent. I hardly know what to say about it. Whatever, you should totally read these. Here, try the title story.

TBH tho, I rarely know what to say about short stories in general. I realized while reading this that while my taste in shorts is extremely particular, I have a very difficult time expressing what it actually is:

• Something to do with elegance, and economy of motion. Well, I mean, that one's obvious. But I don't mean just lapidary prose or whatever, it's more about choosing and cutting.
• Something to do with the largeness of the story's idea and the openness or closure of its boundaries. I think maybe a truly good story almost has to be about something that's impossible to know, or has to fail to encompass some crucial part of its premise. Otherwise it's just a really short and boring novel.
• Something to do with... well, I'm already kind of lost in the weeds here, no need to push it to three. The way that middle bullet point crashed and burned pretty much says it all.

Wow, what a singularly unsatisfying digression! 🌻

Martha Wells — Stories of the Raksura vol. 2: The Dead City and The Dark Earth Below

Oct 13

Speaking of short stories! So, I consider Wells to be a supremely novelistic writer (her small-scale structures are very simple, but she's a master of layering them to create magnificent large-scale structures), and tbh I think her short stories often aren't quite good. By my incalculable and inarticulable standards, cf. above! If I step aside from myself a bit, I think they're probably solid stories in the vein of the old SF and adventure magazines; it's just that I have no particular interest in that, and am looking for something entirely else whenever I wade into some shorts.

But, I generally enjoyed these anyway, because for the most part they're not precisely short stories; they're shrapnel and fragments flaking off a larger novelistic edifice that I'm already familiar with and invested in. The hypertext halo around a good novel. I don't think they stand alone very well, but they don't have to.

More evidence of that effect: The one non-Raksura story in here happens to be the second story I've read about that group of characters, and it retroactively improved that other story. I suspect she's got about a short novel worth of story for these people and it just hasn't really made sense to tie it together yet. A writer with a higher natural density level might be able to show that depth holographically; use subchannels and interference patterns to give the impression that you're reading book-sized people in a short. But Wells maybe needs more space, and sure enough, once she doubles these characters' page-time and gives them a wider variety of situations to deal with, they start to round out a bit.

Still though, the best one of this bunch is the longest one, "The Dead Earth Below." Which is unsurprising, since Wells is very good at novella scales, cf. Murderbot.

Gengoroh Tagame — My Brother’s Husband vol. 1 (comics)

Apr 22

This was decent and I enjoyed it (although this first volume ends in a really odd and arbitrary spot). Yaichi’s confusion about why he and his brother drifted apart feels super uncomfortable and real. When I’ve drifted away from people I cared about, it has sort of that texture; not a big clear break, but a sort of smoky forgetting.

I'm real curious about the intended audience, all up and down the chain. Like who was Tagame writing it for, who was his editor and Japanese publisher hoping to sell it to, who is the English translation aimed at, etc. Because the level of sophistication kind of veers all over the place! There's all this incredibly basic stuff strewn around throughout, like the dramatic realization that there's no "wife" in a gay marriage, but the art marks it as being for a gay male audience,* who I don’t think need the remedial material. And then there’s the jacket blurbs?!

I know this was a bit of a departure for Tagame. I wonder if it was a bit of a departure for the Japanese literary comics publishing market, too. I wonder how much mid-stream editorial input there was.

Well, I wonder a lot of things, it’s kind of my whole deal. That's all mostly beside the point; this is a pretty good comic.

* Yaichi is the most implausibly jacked work-from-home sad-sack dad I’ve ever seen in fiction. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying.

N.K. Jemisin — The Killing Moon

May 9

Once upon a time I bounced off this, but on a second attempt I liked it quite a lot. This is half of a duology, and it looks like it’s a two-book-shaped-books series, because this one came to a pretty comprehensive end. TBH I'm not sure where it goes from here! Guess I'll find out.

What this reminds me of most isn’t Jemisin’s other work, but Kate Elliot’s Spirit Gate, which was another series-starter I bounced off of years ago and have been meaning to revisit. They’re both doing this sort of hyper-intellectual system-model mode of high fantasy, where they set up this society that seems just way too balanced and static to be plausible, then reveal the instability at the core so we can watch what the engine does when you drop a handful of pop-rocks in the tank. A top-down highly-plotted approach that’s sort of the antithesis of the rambling character-driven fat fantasy mode (e.g. Song of Ice and Fire); it can yield very satisfying outcomes, but it can sometimes feel a little sterile, especially at the start.

In both cases, I think I initially bounced off because 1: I couldn’t quite believe in their initial steady state, and 2: the system-driven plot was making me worry that the characters were going to be bullshit. When I started this again, I immediately saw why I'd bounced; chapter one asks you to stipulate that people in this country are generally happy to be visited by a euthanasia incubus, way before showing any of the material benefits of having euthanasia incubii around, and the next few chapters mostly avoid that whole question in favor of quadrupling the cast and introducing like four more plot threads.

Anyway, I pushed through that this time, and I’m glad I did. The characters filled in a bit — they're still kind of flat if you compare them to the Broken Earth or Inheritance trilogies, and you can kind of tell that she wrote this before either of those, but they were perfectly serviceable. The texture of the world is real good; a variety of sorta-related but very distinct cultures and nations in long-term low-key conflict, and a cool and very detailed ancient Africa setting (it's Egypt, I gather, but not the Egypt you generally see around in fantasy; very B-side, brings in a lot of... I think ancient southern Nile geography and culture? NOT AN EXPERT HERE).

So yeah, it's very systematic, and it's somewhat more interested in the plot and the world than it is in the characters, but if you're in a good headspace for that, this is pretty great.

Sarah Pinsker — “And Then There Were n-1” (long-ish short story)

May 16

Available online, and it looks like it's also part of this recent collection.

A murder mystery where all the characters are alternate-universe versions of the same person. Hilariously, because of the way Instapaper displayed this and because I wasn't already familiar with Pinsker, I didn't realize until the end that said person was literally the author.

Anyway, I liked this quite a bit. I later read another of her stories, and I liked that too.

Oops, looks like maybe I haven't posted any of the books I've read this year? Well, here's a batch:

Italo Calvino — If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Jan 1

Equal parts exhilarating and frustrating.

I thought the framing story's main romance plot was obnoxious, and a couple of the later first chapter fragments were too choked with Dudely Bullshit to actually enjoy. But wow, the first five or so fragments created such an enchanting effect! That stylistic mimicry must have been tough as shit to do, and the framing device of translation and mistranslation and forgery made my brain fizz, at least until the answers to the mysteries started shaking out.

All told, I think I class this with Cloud Atlas, where I admire it for its technical accomplishments but don't really think it has a lot to say or find it rewarding as a whole. The first half is totally worth a read, but I endorse bailing whenever you feel done.

Kohei Horikoshi — My Hero Academia vols. 8-16 (comics)

Jan 9-10 (vols 8-12), Jan 18 (vols 13-15), Jan 30 (vol 16)

Well, I blazed through the rest of what's available in English at the library, and now I'm probably done with it for a while — a volume goes down so fast that reading them as they come out is kind of a drag.

Anyway, this brought me up to the point where the large-scale outline of the story has finally emerged. And I think I'm still sort of invested, but,

1. There's a sort of fatigue that tends to set in on a long series right around this point, where the real plot finally comes into view and then another episodic complication kicks in and it takes forever for the plot to actually move forward again, and that's often where I fall off a series, so we'll see.
2. The one transgender character so far (a villain) met an ignominious end right around the time I paused, and I'm annoyed about how that shook out.
3. I'm not really enjoying anything about that one blood-themed schoolgirl-sexy shapeshifter villain, and at pause point it looked like she's who the author is most interested in right now, bleh.

Whatever, we'll see! I did enjoy what we got to see of All For One, he was a very impressive Fucker.

Rory Frances and Jae Bearhat — Little Teeth (comics)

Jan 17

Episodic and meandering, but delightful. A series of interwoven vignettes about a group of young queer folks having drama and getting by.

Catherynne M. Valente — Space Opera

Feb 19

IMO the crucial bit about correctly doing a Douglas Adams riff isn't the prose styling or genre trappings; it's all about joking around on the outside while being really pretty desperately torn up about something quite important and incredibly sad.

I enjoyed this.

Maria Capelle Frantz — The Chancellor and the Citadel (comics)

Feb 19

This was really strange and really compelling. It feels like something I dreamed, and I look forward to re-reading it in probably a similar daze.

Ann Leckie — The Raven Tower

Feb 27

This book rules. Also, I find it low-key hilarious that Leckie’s god characters are way more traditionally AI-like than her AI characters. The narrator was great, and I loved the little bits that helped cement their oddness and the oddness of their place in the world, like the repetitions of “Here is a story I heard.” I really liked The Myriad, too. (Would I trade a reasonable sacrifice of blood every year for total immunity from mosquitoes? INSTANTLY.)

Anyway, this was a delicious layer cake of revenge stories — a satisfyingly bloody Hamlet riff on top of... I guess Reverse Cask of Amontillado?

Lots to love about the setting, too. Man!

I hope things turned out ok for the hero and his girlfriend. What a wild run of wrong-place-wrong-time, god damn.