Way back in February, so long ago that dinosaurs still walked among us and we had to use spider skillets to make baked goods at the flames of an open hearth, the absolute angels at Tor sent me an ARC of Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth. It would be hard for me to convey the pure, all-consuming joy that I felt while read Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth — hard both because language fails when one attempts to express transcendence, and also because in these quarantimes one struggles to understand happiness. Still, though, if you cast your mind back through the…
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We each spend these quarantimes dowsing for happiness, waving our rods hither and yon in the ever-more-vain hope that happiness will appear just beneath the surface. There is a happiness drought, and we are denounced as frauds for believing we can find it. But there is hope! Kit Rocha’s Deal with the Devil is here, and it has all the happiness (and waving rods1) you could desire! In the aftermath of enormous solar flares and governmental collapse, Nina and her team of mercenary librarians have carved out a home for themselves. They share knowledge and stories with their community and…
Leave a Commenttl;dr I liked a lot of things about The Angel of the Crows but a few other things, most notably how the book talks about asexuality, caused me to inhale sharply through my teeth and pinch the bridge of my nose for ten hours in a row So the matter as it stands is that I have never enjoyed a piece of Sherlock Holmes media, with the exception of Elementary, which I watched for two seasons. I would have watched a lot more of it if Natalie Dormer had been the co-lead with Lucy Liu. As a gesture of intellectual…
Leave a CommentA weird thing has befallen me, and I need help understanding how to feel. The Millions finally released their second half of 2020 book preview, and I have read it but yet somehow I have added… very few books to my own TBR list? Is it possible that 2020 has finally broken me? Do I no longer possess the capacity to feel joy? Is that what… Nevertheless: The Millions Book Preview, July – December 2020 Edition. (link) Hope Wabuke on the KKK joke. (link) Isabel Wilkerson considers the persistent caste system and the old, broken-down house that is America. (link)…
Leave a CommentLulu Shapiro is rather famous on Snapchat Flash, not least because of the video she took of herself kissing another girl — the video that led to her breakup with her boyfriend Owen. In the aftermath of going viral, Lulu has hidden in plain sight, shutting herself off from her real life friends while creating an image on Not!Snapchat of a perfect life of elegant parties and beautifully framed selfies. But at one of those parties, she meets Cass, who takes her to spend time at her rich friend Ryan’s new work-in-progress, The Hotel. No phones are allowed at the…
Leave a CommentLuc never knew his rock star father, but now that his dad’s making a comeback as the judge of a reality music show, Luc himself is back in the spotlight. When he’s photographed falling down outside of a bar (perfectly! innocently!), it threatens to compromise his job. He needs a respectable boyfriend to help clean up his image, and his straight friend has just the person: the only other gay guy she knows, vegetarian (yes) barrister (yes) Oliver Backwood (yep). And as it happens, Oliver could use a date to a family function too. It’s a match made in the…
Leave a CommentIf you are in America, I hope that you have today off in which to read plenty of awesome things, and a quiet weekend where people for God’s sake get their act together and stop shooting off every single firework. I plan to read a bunch of nonsense and hopefully write a book review post for Monday. I probably remember how to write posts of this kind. And maybe I will do something pretend-productive like enter old reviews into Storygraph. Relatedly, I’m on Storygraph! Follow me! “At your best, a companion. At your worst, a danger.” Linda Holmes examines white/black…
1 CommentSo A Black Women’s History of the United States is the latest in a series from Beacon Press that I absolutely love. The first one I read was An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, which btw is also stupendous and y’all should all buy it. Since then I have acquired several other books in the series, so the queer one and the disability one are ON MY SHELVES WAITING FOR ME. Having read two of these books, I would like to report that they are both amazingly concise, readable, and filled with information. I would…
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