“My issue with how we read is as much an existential grievance as it is a labor dispute.” Elaine Castillo addresses the foundation of white supremacy in the literary world, making me VERY excited to read her book.

This is an absolutely bananas story about a criminology professor whose life, uh, takes a turn.

On authors who cross categories.

It’s hard to keep track of all the shit the Supreme Court is currently doing, but ONE of the things they’re doing is decimating the rights of Native nations.

Carmen Maria Machado discusses the Jumi Bello plagiarism thing and considers a better path forward for writers and writing programs.

Here’s why there’s a shortage of peer reviewers, tenure committee members, and journal editors.

How ASL is changing in the digital age.

Really excited to learn that the Department of Education cannot tell the people who owe it money for student loans how much they’ve paid off, how much is left to pay, and what the interest rate is. Super normal stuff.

The mutant metaphor: A new generation is falling in love with the X-Men via queer communities online.

Look, YES I am obsessed with reading about the new book about Go Ask Alice, but NO I am not going to read it probably because tbh I feel like I have gotten everything I need from the media coverage of the book. Anyway, here is Casey Cep.

“Nichelle Nichols gave us the future – what we make of it is up to us.”

I loved this interview with the actresses of Yellowjackets.

Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel was inspired by the growing tendency to sort everyone into buckets of like-me and not-like-me.

Biden’s commission on how to fix the Supreme Court has finished its work, and the report has some interesting and helpful ideas.

In case you’ve missed the updates on the S&S / Random Penguin merger, John Maher is doing yeoman’s work in live-tweeting the trial. You can also check out the New York Times explainer and the Vanity Fair explainer. Also, Amazon is playing a silent role in this trial.

Money diaries: How prison inmates make money and what they spend it on. (Surprise, it’s horrifying.)

Many stars of Twitch and other video services have had to learn how to live with stalkers and harassers.

It’s great that Beyonce and Lizzo changed their offensive lyrics; but why are we so stingy with second chances and benefits of the doubt when it comes to Black women artists?

The New York Times has a handy explainer of why restaurant prices are soaring.

The Good Little Pig and the trend of bathos in contemporary literature.

“Yuval Harari is what I call a ‘science populist.’… [His] errors are numerous and substantial.”

Tressie McMillan Cottom considers the beloved-by-conservatives TV show Yellowstone.

Happy Friday, friends!

The post I Am Very Excited to Read Elaine Castillo’s Book: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Barry Jenkins worked hard to avoid sensationalizing and exploiting Black trauma in his adaptation of The Underground Railroad, but the material was difficult nonetheless. A therapist was on set at all times to protect and help the cast and crew. (link)

Always read an Alex Brown review! They’re at Tor this week reviewing Barry Jenkins’s new TV adaptation of The Underground Railroad, which handles Black trauma with care and thoughtfulness. (link)

And (last The Underground Railroad thing!) Angelica Jade Bastién reviewed the show with her customary eloquence. (link)

I was completely unaware of the slander websites economy, but the New York Times did a deep dive to find out who runs these sites, and who runs the sites you can pay to clean up your online presence. (link)

“Ideas don’t disappear when they’re banned.” Carmen Maria Machado responds to attempts to ban students from reading her book In the Dream House. (link)

“A woman once stopped my mother in a supermarket and told her that she had abilities to speak to the dead. “It’s a power I can develop if I want to,” my mother bragged. But she didn’t want to.” On Korean history, trauma, and ghosts. (link)

Access to affirming, culturally competent mental health care is a community and social justice issue. (link)

David Treuer makes the (excellent) case for giving national parks back to Native nations. (link)

Without any of us noticing, online shopping has undergone a sea change. We are buffeted by the uncaring waves of social media marketing. (link)

How Netflix frames the stories of people like Joe Exotic and Colton Underwood, at the expense of the people they’ve harmed. (link)

Interracial relationships have begun to appear far more frequently in movies, TV, and commercials. But do these depictions grapple with the realities of interracial dating? (link)

“Just write the parts that are exciting to you, and figure out later how you’re going to connect it.” Brit Bennett on discovering joy in her writing. (link)

What does a guilty pleasure mean? (link)

A deep dive into how Martin Bashir used dishonest tactics to get That Interview. (link)

The authors of two new books I’m very excited for discuss their inspirations: Dawnie Walton on The Final Revival of Opal and Nev (link) and Zakiya Dalila Harris on The Other Black Girl (link).

Here’s a question for the group, before we go: If you could talk to ghosts, would you?

The post An Underground Railroad–Forward Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

“It’s disingenuous to say their race doesn’t matter in this world, when the most prominent and numerous people are white.” On the racial casting choices of Bridgerton. https://observer.com/2021/01/bridgerton-sees-race-through-a-colorist-lens/ And along the same lines: If Bridgerton wanted Black aristocracy, why didn’t they portray Haiti? (link)

Repressed memories, implanted memories, false memories: How did the narrative around these things develop in psychology, and is it merited? (cw: child sexual abuse and CSA apologism) (link)

This GQ story of the 2020 capture of a Rwandan war criminal who has evaded justice for decades was extremely fascinating. (It does talk about the Rwandan genocide, and early in the article there’s some disturbing descriptions of the violence in that period.) (link)

I just can’t get enough of profiles and interviews with Amanda Gorman, whose performance was an absolute standout in the inauguration. (link)

“To tell a student that ‘said’ is her only option is ‘not to teach her to write better, but to teach her whose writing is better,’ Salesses argues.” An interview with Matthew Salesses, author of the new book Craft in the Real World. (link)

This is a fascinating, and horrifying, deep dive into the story of a German doctor accused of sexually assaulting vulnerable HIV patients for decades. (link)

“The character of a distributed, rules-optional game isn’t made of paper and ink, stony tropes or immovable stereotypes. First and foremost, it reflects the character of its players.” On racism in D&D. (link)

Namwali Serpell considers the racial politics of Soul and the tradition of race-transformation tales in American cinema. (link)

The Rahm Emmanuel Livejournal fan community is an embarrassing relic of the days when many liberals uncritically idolized political figures. WERE WE EVER SO YOUNG. (link)

Reading Sara Ahmed’s work always requires a lot of focus from me (her language is simple but her ideas are dense), but it’s invariably worth it for gems like this: “Reconciliation can be experienced as the enforcement of communication.” (link)

Who gets to escape into fandom? (White people! It’s white people.) (link)

Joshua Yehl considers the case of Harry Potter fandom and how, if at all, it’s possible now to ethically engage with JK Rowling’s work. (link)

“How many women—one, two, fifty, ten thousand, more—will we sacrifice to the ravenous maw of men’s promise?” Carmen Maria Machado on Promising Young Woman. (link)

AOC refuted the lies that Republicans want to tell about what happened on 1/6 of this year. (link)

The invention (and consequences) of printing books. (link)

“The fact that Levinson, who is white, has decided to deploy Washington, who is Black, as a shield for his rhetorical bomb-throwing inspires enough eye-rolling to power a household appliance.” Soraya Nadia McDonald on Malcolm and Marie. (link)

“Knowing that some people are already invested in the characters does mean you can skip straight to being very nasty to them.” The best line of an excellent interview with Emily Tesh, Everina Maxwell, and A. K. Larkwood. (link)

“They want to be safe from us, but they don’t want us to be safe from them.” On policing library patrons. (link)

What have y’all been reading this week? Books, internet articles? Tell me everything!

The post Really a lot of thoughts on racism: A links round-up appeared first on Reading the End.

Insurrecto, Gina Apostol

I liked this book so much I went to a conference and hovered at the Soho Press booth and pestered everyone who stopped by into purchasing it. It worked on, like, two people. And me! I also bought it. Insurrecto is tricky to explain because it’s so complicated and strange — which, if that doesn’t sound good to you, Insurrercto may not be your book. It’s about a massacre of Filipino people that happened during the Philippine-American War, and the two women who are writing film scripts about that massacre. Their scripts are in competition/conversation with each other, although not necessarily in the ways you might expect. So the book follows the two script-writers, and also the stories that each of their scripts is telling, one about a white photographer and the other about a teacher in the village where the masssacre takes place.

Gina Apostol’s writing is gorgeous, but more than that, her book is fun, as strange as that is to say about a book with an atrocity at its center. She’s never glib about what American colonialism did to the Philippines, but she does find the absurdity and humanity around the edges of that. Insurrecto is a fundamentally humane book, and it’s also very, very clever without smacking you over the head with its cleverness. Gina Apostol has another book coming out in the US this year, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, which is done in footnotes and sounds incredible. I cannot wait to read it!

A Spark of White Fire, Sangu Mandanna

In part because of the nonstop bullshit (sorry to keep making excuses, but 4 real we are living in a bad timeline), I haven’t written as many reviews this year as usual. I regret this! Not least because when I don’t write about books I enjoyed, i don’t remember the details of why I enjoyed them. A Spark of White Fire was one that I read early in the year, and I remember thinking “this is just some good old-fashioned fun, and I couldn’t be more here for it,” but I also can’t…super remember what happened in it. Fucking fun adventures happened, my friends! A girl intends to win a competition, so that she can be brought back to the family she has lost, and ultimately help restore her brother to his rightful throne. In space! A Spark of White Fire is inspired by ancient Indian stories, including the Mahabharata, and it’s the first in a trilogy that promises to be awesome. I have the sequel out from the library now. Hopefully Sangu Mandanna has made provisions for assholes like me who didn’t write notes about the book after they read it and now can’t remember anything. YA novels are typically good about this.

(JRR Tolkien did something great and made a little “previously on” section for the second and third books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it was such a kindness to me, a forgetful dingbat.)

For a Muse of Fire, Heidi Heilig

Although in many ways this is an equally exciting YA adventure novel as A Spark of White Fire, For a Muse of Fire also gave me emotions about mental illness. It’s about a bipolar girl with magic who travels around animating shadow puppets for her family’s troupe — but she can never reveal that she’s controlling the puppets with magic, because her type of magic has been banned by the colonizers of her home country. It’s the postcolonialist musical theater story of your dreams. Like A Spark of White Fire, its sequel is newly out, but the gods have cursed me and it keeps being checked out at my library because I am cursed.

Also, if you want to read a book that has an accompanying soundtrack, For a Muse of Fire has one. It’s glorious. I love multimedia books. This is a theme that will come back later.

Punishment without Crime, Alexandra Natapoff

Remember when I read Delusions of Gender? And how I was like, oh my God, how does a book that I already agree with keep blowing my mind so cinematically? That was the experience of reading Punishment without Crime, a book about the legal system around misdemeanors and how people who have committed tiny civil offenses get penalized for poverty and caught up in the web of the criminal justice system. I knew all of this was true before I began. But Natapoff lays it out in the clearest terms, and it’s impossible not to be furious with a “justice” system that would do such irrevocable damage to people who haven’t done anything. It’s shocking, except for how not-shocking it is. If you only read one nonfiction book this year, I highly recommend that it be this one. Unless you haven’t read Delusions of Gender, in which case maybe do that first.

The Psychology of Time Travel, Kate Mascarenhas

Had I not been on a bus when I was reading The Psychology of Time Travel, I would have been screaming “HOW ARE YOU SO GREAT” at a very high volume whilst reading it. I legit couldn’t believe that a single book could be so fun and weird and delightful. I liked it so much I did something frightening and pitched a review to Strange Horizons about it, because I could not bear the possibility that people wouldn’t know about The Psychology of Time Travel and how fucking great it is.

The premise is that time travel is invented after World War II by a group of British women. Then, as they’re presenting their findings to the press, one of the women has a breakdown. Their leader immediately pushes her out of the group and tailors the entire time travel system to ensure that nobody will ever have an emotion again. That’s one description of the book. Another is: A woman receives a newspaper clipping about the horrifying death of an elderly lady. The weird thing is, the clipping is from the future.

GOD IT’S SO GOOD. As I was reading, I was perpetually re-delighted by what a marvelous puzzle box this book is. I implore you to read it. Read it, and then come talk to me about it. I just got it for Christmas, and I want to reread it immediately and then talk about it with sixteen different people.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

I cannot scream enough about Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, although I am doing my level best to scream enough about it. It’s the story of a girl named Freddie who can’t quit her shitty sort-of girlfriend, Laura Dean, even though all her friends are clear that she ought to. This YA comic is the dearest, sweetest, goodest book that ever I have read in this entire year. If any part of this year filled me with sorrow about the future of the nation, at least I had Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me to solace me in my dark night of the soul.

We are honestly blessed to have a writer like Mariko Tamaki working these days. In my old age, I have grown extremely protective of The Youth and also deeply resentful of adults who seem to have completely forgotten what it was like to be a youth. So I cherish Mariko Tamaki for clearly remembering what it was like to be a kid. Being a kid is dumb. Zero stars. Would not do again. And Laura Dean absolutely captures the shittiness of being a kid and not knowing anything, while also being extremely tender and gentle and good. Rosemary Valero-O’Connell’s art is similarly flawless, with oodles of moments that are such spot-on reminders of teenagerhood.

When the Ground Is Hard, Malla Nunn

Why can’t I have more African YA? ANSWER ME THAT. Malla Nunn is a Swazi author, and When the Ground Is Hard is a treasure of a boarding school book. I say that as a connoisseur (connoisseuse?) of boarding school books. When the Ground Is Hard is about a girl in a Swazi boarding school who faces an abrupt loss of status when her best friend, supposedly, ditches her for a fancier girl. She’s immediately forced to room with the school’s weirdo outcast, Lottie, only to find that Lottie is more loyal and good than any friend she’s ever had. I had reservations about the depiction of the disabled character, which was disappointing, but overall I thought the book was great and I desire more African YA.

To Tell the Truth Freely, Mia Bay

You know how sometimes you start to read a biography of someone you admire based on the child’s biography you read of that person in second grade? And you’re concerned that when you read a grown-up biography, you’ll discover all the bad things about the person and you won’t feel the same about them? Well, I read a grown-up biography of Ida B. Wells, and I discovered that she’s exactly as amazing as I always assumed she was. In fact, she was more amazing. Even better, she had a good marriage. I am just so happy for her. She deserved a partner who admired the shit out of her and supported all her endeavors, and that’s what she got. She also kept working in this astonishing tireless way, even though it was frustrating and she was constantly being foiled by the forces of sexism and white supremacy.

tl;dr Ida B. Wells is even cooler than you thought.

The Ventriloquists, E. R. Ramzipoor

My favorite thing about historical fiction is that every time I decide to do a gavel bang and declare that historical fiction is not for me, I am seduced into reading some historical fiction book that reminds me why historical fiction is good, actually. In 2019 that was E. R. Ramzipoor’s The Ventriloquists, a World War II novel in which the lesbians survive and everyone works together to make fun of the Nazis on a grand scale.

(Don’t let that summary fool you. I’ve made it sound tremendously chipper, but it’s really genuinely quite sad. Because: Nazis. But still, it’s a really moving and lovely book, and there are parts that are quite funny.)

The Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado

When Carmen Maria Machado was in an emotionally abusive relationship, she went to the archive to find information about abusive lesbian relationships, and discovered very little. The Dream House is a corrective to that lacuna, with each brief chapter exploring one element of the relationship and Machado’s thinking about it. As always, Machado’s writing is beautiful and strange, and she makes liberal use of fairy tale motifs as a frame for understanding her own behavior and that of her ex-girlfriend.

Dream House as Famous Last Words

“We can fuck,” she says, “but we can’t fall in love.” [2]

2. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fablieaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955-1958), Type T3, Omens in love affairs.

(It’s also quite short. Not that length is a benchmark of quality, but in these troubled times I am having a hard time getting it up for TOMES. The Dream House is a tight 242 pages, and many of the chapters are quite short, a few pages or even a single page. Given the difficult subject matter, this sort of length makes the book very approachable. God, I hope Carmen Maria Machado never sees this blog post. “Her book was short! Five stars!” I hate myself.)

Steel Tide, Natalie Parker

I read the first book in this series, Seafire, towards the end of last year and absolutely loved it: It’s an adventure at sea about a shipful of angry girls fighting back against a warlord who controls everything. Steel Tide is the second in the series, and it more than lives up to the promise of the first one. I don’t have the most to say about it, because you need to have read the first one for this one to make sense, but I can tell you that it’s so exciting and suspenseful I had to walk away from the book a couple of times in order to cope with. I am a sucker for a YA adventure novel, and Natalie Parker’s Seafire series delivers that in spades.

Rules for Vanishing, Kate Alice Marshall

This book. Was so. Scary. I don’t have much else to add. Rules for Vanishing was a terrifying nightmare of a YA novel. I loved it, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

So that’s it! My best of 2019! Did you read any of these? Did you love them? What were some of your faves of the year, and what are you anticipating the most for 2020?

The post The Best Books of 2019 appeared first on Reading the End.

Patricia Highsmith’s diaries are going to be published in 2021. I still haven’t read The Price of Salt, and I am mad at myself about it. Maybe that will be one of my small goals for 2020.

The kids are frankly fucking inspiring.

I was super intrigued by this post about the sexist ways the Austens and Brontes are often portrayed in biographies and fiction.

“Most of us writing now were not educated by that expanded canon.” Alexander Chee on writing stories about people who are different than you.

Dahlia Lithwick hasn’t been back to the Supreme Court since Kavanaugh was confirmed. From the reporter who brought us the Chaos Muppet / Order Muppet theory as part of her Supreme Court reporting, this is devastating. It’s devastating anyway. Fuck the patriarchy.

Listen. Listen. Listen. I have no opinion about whether Jeffrey Epstein was murdered or died by suicide because I am not qualified to assess the evidence. But I do want to be able to depend on people who are qualified to assess the evidence, which, um.

Dialogue from the husbands in every haunted house movie.

Carmen Maria Machado wrote her memoir of surviving a queer abusive relationship because she could not find such books to support her when she was in the midst of the experience. Here’s also a review of her book that I thought was really good.

New English Canaan was a 1637 book that harshly critiqued the Puritan colonizers in America. Sounds fascinating, no?

The demise of Deadspin has been miserable to witness. Anna Merlan reports: Blogging is hard.

“Romance novels are social novels.” Adriana Herrera (an awesome writer!) on the possibilities that diverse romance novels offer.

Attention please, these are all the holiday movies. Brace for incoming.

Malka Older talks utopia, dystopia, and the necessity of imagining better futures for ourselves.

Feminist bookstores are having a renaissance in the South.

That’s all for today! Have a wonderful weekend, please topple the patriarchy responsibly, and I’ll see you back here on Monday, when we will all recommence weeping and tearing our hair over the future (slash, doom?) of the world.

The post I Really Need to Read The Price of Salt Already: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Just kidding! Those things are both incredible! So I’m kicking off this links round-up with Isaac Chotiner’s very magical interview with Bret Easton Ellis, as well as a review of the “old man yells at cloud” book Ellis has, apparently, written. Be blessed.

“It felt hidden, like I said a magic word and there was Prague.” An interview with Helen Oyeyemi.

The rise of publicly thirsty women.

Some thoughts on cultural appropriation, rules, and self-censorship, from Jeannette Ng.

An extremely normal and fine profile of Carmen Maria Machado. (I advise reading it in its entirety.)

How bad is EL James’s new book? SO BAD.

The medical establishment uses men as a baseline for almost everything — which has led to massive health inequities for women.

Katy Waldman found her own experiences in a book (not in a good way).

Celebrating Easter Sunday among the black congregations in Louisiana whose churches were burned by an arsonist this year: an exercise in generosity and forgiveness.

Nathan Robinson attended the Zizek/Peterson “debate” so we wouldn’t have to.

Wesley Morris grieves for the demise of the romantic comedy (and so do I).

Have an incredible weekend, friends! Mine is going to contain brambles and crawfish, so I will be the happiest camper the world has ever known. (Also a little bit of phone-banking but I’m trying not to think too much about that.)

The post Making Fun of Bret Easton Ellis: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

And now, on to the links.

Drop everything and read this profile of Jonathan Franzen. It brought such joy to my heart. It was everything I wanted it to be.

Heart of darkness: The grim, authoritarian soul of Thomas the Tank Engine. (This is not new but it is new to me and I need y’all to be aware of it.)

Which borough of New York City would win in a civil war?

Misogyny is boring as hell: A profile of writer Carmen Maria Machado.

That time England paid reparations for slavery — to slaveowners. (And other horrifying stories from the British history of slavery.)

“Alabama organizers have literally never stopped fighting.” Imani Perry on her home state.

Roxane Gay on why To Kill a Mockingbird matters (or doesn’t).

About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters.

While I wish this article had talked more about nonbinary folks, who also face a ton of harassment, it was still good to hear from women who have faced harassment as they talk about what they still value about the internet.

The Atlantic’s cover story for Pride Month made me really angry, but Alex Barasch had Slate has a very measured and sensible response to it.

Linda Holmes does not look with favor upon the new Roseanne-without-Roseanne show.

Just read the opening two paragraphs of this piece on women in Luke Cage, even if you don’t want the spoilers from the full article. Because they are a gut punch.

Harassers seem to apologize to everybody except the person they harassed.

Take care of yourselves, friends! Whatever care looks like for you, take the time for it. We’ll all be still here for the fight on Monday. I love y’all.

The post FRANZEN: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

(Never before has a New Year’s Resolution been so successful I had to commission a logo about it. It’s kind of making me reconsider the success metrics I’ve been using in past years for my New Year’s Resolutions.)

“Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU,” by Carmen Maria Machado, was easily my favorite story in her collection Her Body and Other Parties, one among many parties to which I am very late. It’s a series of imagined episode descriptions, all with Machado’s trademark wit and insight and eeriness. My favorite:

“Sophomore Jinx”: The second time the basketball team covers up a murder, the coach decides that he’s finally had enough.

I have never seen even a single episode of Law and Order, not the mothership and not any of its offspring, so I can’t speak to the quality of this story qua fic, but as a piece of short fiction it’s unsettling and great.

The Book Smugglers’ 2018 season of short fiction kicked off with Sara Fox’s “When the Letter Comes,” a story about a trans girl who waits and waits for her invitation to magic school. But when the letter finally comes, it’s addressed to her younger sister, Gabriele.

One of the things I love about the Book Smugglers’ publishing is that they look for stories where problems are not always solved through cataclysms. Instead, they are addressed by people of good intentions trying their best. Henry, the protagonist of “When the Letter Comes,” lives in a world not entirely satisfactory to her, and she begins — slow and steady — to change things in the ways she can. It’s a dear of a story about making space for yourself in a world that — however much it might need you — isn’t asking for you. If you enjoyed the tropes-toppling of Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands, “When the Letter Comes” will also please you.

Apex Magazine published a terrific little mystery called “Cold Blue Sky” (4000 words) about an android who gets brought in for questioning in a criminal case. This was nearly a slow pitch straight down the middle for me, as I love stories about robots who know more and can do more than the humans around them maybe have realized. In the end, though, I was frustrated that the story didn’t do more with the central tension of its premise: The criminal in question uses our POV android as a weapon in his fight against people using androids and robots as if they aren’t sentient.

Ruth Joffre’s “Nitrate Nocturnes” (Lightspeed, 7620 words) is a wonderful corrective to all the things that drive me batty about soulmate stories. In this story, everyone in the world has timers on their wrists, counting down the days and minutes and seconds until they meet their soulmates. Fiona is supposed to be sixty-four when she meets her soulmate — except that her timer begins to lose minutes, as if her soulmate is coming closer to her.

And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for:

Murderbot Murderbot Murderbot Murderbottttttttt. Did I tell you that May was the month of Murderbot? It may have slipped my mind. May is the month of Murderbot! Hooray! (Other months of Murderbot will include August and October, so brace yourself for more Murderbot screaming in those posts.)

After the traumatic events of All Systems Red (poor old Murderbot), Murderbot is trying to sort out what its life is going to look like next. In Artificial Condition, it makes friends with a transport ship that also enjoys serial dramas — that part’s jolly — and makes arrangements to go back to the site of the massacre it’s supposed to have committed. That part’s less jolly. Murderbot is struggling with its identity and what it desires from life as a free robot; it’s also, of course, trying not to be discovered as a rogue SecUnit, lest it be sent back into captivity.

Is it weird to identify so strongly with a snarky, anxious, miserable, antisocial murderbot? Murderbot maintains a certain wry distance from its own feelings and desires, but its attempts at detached irony slip just often enough to make it impossible not to love. Martha Wells is achieving monumental feats of emotional echolocation with this series, and it’s an inspiration to witness.

The transport bot said, You dislike your function. I don’t understand how that is possible.

Its function was traveling through what it thought of as the endlessly fascinating sensation of space, and keeping all its human and otherwise passengers safe inside its metal body. Of course it didn’t understand not wanting to perform your function. Its function was great.

Oh, Murderbot.

All I want from August and October is for Murderbot to find happiness. Right now I do not know exactly what that would look like, but I am placing my trust in Martha Wells to find it for us.

The post Shortly Ever After: May appeared first on Reading the End.