My new thing for 2023 is that I’m going to do book pairings.1 I have been meaning to do this for ages, because it always seems like I have pairs of books on my TBR list with thematic resonances or similar premises, and I always intend to (but don’t) read them both together to see what that gets me. Well, 2023 is my year! I may not be doing much of anything this year, and my main accomplishment for the year may be that I survived it and bought a Steam Deck2 but BY GOD, I am going to pair…
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Hi friends! My second and third Ships in the Night columns on SFF romance have gone up at Tor! In the second one, I talk about Suleikha Snyder’s wonderful Third Shift series and the power of community to sustain the fight for equality. (I got too cute in my bio for this one and therefore did not get tagged on Twitter when it came out and therefore did not promote it at the time, because I am a dope.) Then the third one is about the romance novel cinematic universe, specifically in Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling-Trinity series, and how it resolves…
Leave a CommentWe open on Dream feeding pigeons in the park and doing the world’s biggest-ever sulk. He catches an errant ball without looking, and as its owner retrieves it, KIRBY HOWELL-BAPTISTE!!!!! walks up. (The owner of the ball is called Franklin. He’s adorable, but he’s also a race-bent character who I know is going to die by the end of the episode, which like… agh! This is happening too often! Please, Sandman casting people, contemplate the ramifications of these choices!) KIRBY HOWELL-BAPTISTE!!!!! as Death is the best casting in an altogether well-cast series. She’s warm and funny, and she has an…
Leave a CommentJohanna Constantine dreams. I am in love with her. She’s wearing the worst pants in the world, yet she still looks beautiful. How? I don’t know. I am surprised to find this level of allegiance to Jenna Coleman within my heart. She’s such a little chipmunk face! There’s some business I don’t fully understand where she has to clean up the satanic ritual mess of an irresponsible drunk with an adorable daughter called Astra, but it doesn’t matter too much because in the next shot Constantine has woken up from her scary dream and is getting out of a cab…
Leave a CommentLovely, lovely, wonderful listeners, the time has come. It is our last ever podcast. Over the course of the pandemic (as you will inevitably have noticed), we have had a harder and harder time getting podcast made, and we eventually realized that it was time to shut the thing down. We’ve had such a great time podcasting together and interacting with you fantastic people, and we will miss you a ton. This final episode features A GAME, a meta-chat about the podcast and what we’ve learned and how we’ve changed and why one of us is just deeply, deeply wrong…
1 CommentThe older I get, the more cynical I become about the consciences of the very rich. Used to be when fictional rich people were cartoonishly evil, I would think it was unrealistic. Now I’m like, no, actually, that sounds right. Rich people probably do poison each other at parties for shits and giggles. Tripping Arcadia had my number from the beginning by telling me in the introduction that a whole bunch of amoral rich people were probably going to die. Like, way to reel me in, book! Not just telling me the end before I read the middle, but promising…
Leave a CommentThe news right now is absolutely devastating, and any words of mine feel inadequate. I am saying prayers for trans kids and families in Texas, and for everyone in Ukraine (and Afghanistan, still; I have not forgotten about Afghanistan), and I am always on the lookout for ways to help, even though overall I feel very helpless. If you have recommendations of good places to send money, drop them in the comments! I continue to derive so much comfort from reading, and to that end I’ve got some links. I also recommend the brand new television show Abbott Elementary and…
Leave a CommentThe mercenary librarians are back in The Devil You Know, and they’re just as librarian as before! If possible even more librarian, insofar as there are multiple scenes of scanning books so the books will be shareable to a wider group of people. Y’all may remember me screeching and carrying on about the first book in this series, Deal with the Devil, and how gosh-darn fun it was despite being about a dystopian future in which a few scrappy and independent-minded escapees of government torture banded together to carve out a small space for happiness and community. Well, this is…
Leave a Commenttldr: Wow. When Nghi Vo released her first novella, Empress of Salt and Fortune, I was blown away by her talent at the task category “putting a book together.” I know that’s a very unsexy way to describe a novella, but it applies! Empress packed so much plot, emotional insight, and character development into its 128 pages that it felt like an apotheosis of the novella form. (My use here of apotheosis will be but the first of many hyperbolic shrieks throughout this review, because I’m about as bullish on Nghi Vo’s writing as I have been about any author…
1 CommentIt’s Friday! And not to tip my hand, but I have a favorite from among my links today, and I’m putting my favorite link first, and hopefully you too will enjoy it as I did. It’s about those mystery seeds. Remember those mystery seeds? From last year? A bunch of people started getting mysterious seeds in the mail, from China, and then it was like, aaaa, where are these seeds even coming from? Why is China sending people seeds? WHAT GIVES? The answer may surprise you. Have some links. The China seeds mystery, solved. (link) IDK maybe we shouldn’t have…
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