klwilliams

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the first book in a duology, and it's the kind of duology that's really one book split into two volumes. The end of this book is merely the stopping point of this book, not in any way an ending. If that bothers you, wait around until the other half is out.

Honestly I can't tell you why I didn't love this book. I wanted to love this book. It's a secondary world fantasy where one of the central relationships of the book is an aunt and nephew, and that kind of non-standard central relationship is absolutely up my alley. It's a fantasy world where magical environmental contamination is a major threat, which is also of great interest to me. Sensitive yet matter-of-fact handling of trans characters, check. Worldbuilding that deviates from standard, check. And there wasn't anything that made me roll my eyes or say ugh! It was just fine! But for me, at least, it was just fine. Honestly if this is your sort of thing I kind of wish you'd read it and tell me what you think might have been going on here, or if it's just...that some books and some people are ships passing in the night.

shewhomust

This morning's post brought a book I had ordered (through Abebooks). It was wrapped in a black plastic bag.

On the bag was the encouraging information: "This bag is made from a minimum 30% post consumer waste plastic and can be recycled again if dispased of correctly."

But don't despair: there's a clue: more information at https://www.recyclenow.com/what-to-do-with-plastic-film. I muttered, naturally, because that's quite a lot to type, and it would be easy to make a mistake, but I copied it very carefully.

I got a 404, of course.

(The bag does have a triangle recycling symbol with a 4 in it, and the letters LDPE, which enabled me to search the website and find an assurance that I could take it to the supermarket with my other plastic bags. Good. But coldn't they just have said that?)

hrj

One of the things I treated myself to in retirement was a lifetime National Park Pass (because of the senior discount). Which, of course, is only useful if I actually use it. I've been thinking about getting back to doing the occasional short car-camping trip. (Short enough to leave the cats to their own devices, so mostly fairly local. But with some light cat-checkup I could get as far as Crater Lake.)

First step will be to pull out all the camping gear to check that it's clean and in good working order. I have a set-up for the back of the Element with an elevated platform bed with gear stowed underneath. I can take a bicycle, but not the recumbent (which is a good argument for keeping the fold-up Brompton).

At one point I bought a pop-up so that I can set up a larger "living space" off the back of the vehicle, which I haven't ever used yet. So I need to do a test set-up. My plan is to use some of the canvas from my old pavilion to create walls for it, so that I can use it for changing. (Changing clothes while wriggling around in a sleeping bag is for the young and flexible.) So I need to do that.

And then, of course, there's the issue of scheduling reservations, though mid-week availability will help there, I imagine. I haven't found a similar program for state parks -- there's a senior discount program, but it isn't as generous. But state parks are more numerous, of course.

larryhammer

For Poetry Monday:

“One word is too often profaned,” Percy Shelley

One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?

Another poem Shelley wrote in 1822 that was posthumously published with the editorial title “To ——.” In this case, —— was Jane Williams, with whom he did not in fact have an affair—he wrote several poems to her, all professing deep friendship, but he seems to have truly kept things at that level (with his history, that’s not a given). Jane Williams and her husband, Edward, were close friends with both Shelleys, and Edward died in the same boating accident that killed Percy. The word is, of course, at the end of line 9.

(That rhyme of accept and reject gets a side-eye.)

---L.

Subject quote from My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own, Connie Francis.

sovay

It would be neither entirely fair nor completely accurate to say that the second season of Andor (2022–25) holocausted too close to the sun for my tolerance, but it got a lot closer than I had thought was possible.

( Nervous, tired, desensitized. )

tl;dr we will be returning to the series once I cool down and the news out of L.A. and D.C. could stop being quite so bleeding-edge at any second. I should decompress with some queer film.

Current Music: Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, "Idiot Box"

sovay

Apparently our particulate pollution levels are officially unhealthy for sensitive groups, which explains not only the light brass tint to the afternoon but the rather massive asthma attack I had instead of sleeping for the entire morning. The day before, I couldn't enjoy the rain because it came with a headache so skull-crunching, I actually sort of passed out from it at a terrible hour to the rest of my schedule. I was under non-joking doctor's orders to rest up this weekend and it has not vaguely happened. I keep being light-headed, ear-ringing, unfocusable. My brain feels like a flickering commodity and I don't like worrying about false flags.

Current Music: Clover County, "Ultraviolet"

sovay

For the seventy-first yahrzeit of Alan Turing, I have been listening to selections from the galaxy-brained fusion of Michael Vegas Mussmann and Payton Millet's Alan Turing and the Queen of the Night (2025) as well as the glitterqueer mad science of Kele Fleming's "Turing Test" (2024). Every year I discover new art in his memory, like Frank Duffy's A lion for Alan Turing (2023). Lately I treasure it like spite. The best would be countries doing better by their queer and trans living than their honored and unnecessary dead.

Current Music: Kele Fleming, "Turing Test"

shewhomust

( From the Mining Art Gallery )

( A Christmas card from Rose Macaulay )

sovay

As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Most Wanted Man"

sovay

As my day centrally involved a very long-awaited referral finally coming through and foundering immediately on the shoals of the American healthcare system, it wasn't a very good one. The CDC called for my opinions on vaccination which it turned out I was not permitted to state for the record without a minor child in the house. Because the call was recorded for quality assurance, I said just in case that I had children in my life if not my legal residence and I supported their vaccination so as to protect them from otherwise life-threatening communicable diseases and did not express my opinion of the incumbent secretary of health and human services and his purity of essence. I got hung up on before I could tell my family stories from before the polio vaccine and the MMR.

Of course the man in the White House used the Boulder attack to justify his latest travel ban. Burned Jews are good for his business. I appreciate this op-ed from Eric K. Ward. I hope it reaches anyone it's meant to. I thought I was jaundiced about people and now I think I'm just in liver failure.

It would never have occurred to me that a video for Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (1977) should have anything to do with psychological realism, but Saoirse Ronan seems to have had a great time with it.

Current Music: Sam Fender, "Tyrants"

jacey

Narrated by Wil Wheaton
Fantasy, science fiction or pure absurdist literature? You’ll need to make your own mind up about that. It’s probably all three. The premise is that the moon, all of a sudden, turns to cheese. What kind of cheese? Not sure, but because cheese is less dense than rock and because the moon’s mass has not altered, it’s suddenly bigger and brighter and everyone notices. Rather than following one main character this book works as a series of interspersed stories as people from different walks of life react differently. First we meet the staff of a museum which holds a piece of moon rock; rock until it isn’t. Then there’s an academic turned pop-science author, a bunch of NASA astronauts whose dreams have been shattered, three retirees who meet in a diner to put the world to rights, a young girl who simply wants to write her great fantasy novel, and a tech-bro billionaire who manages to stowaway on his own rocket -- not to mention the American top-brass and the president of the United States. This is quirky and absurd. Wil Wheaton’s reading is at once serious and funny. Maybe this isn’t for everyone, but I enjoyed the listen.

jacey

Audiobook narrated by Humphrey Bower.

The final book in the Chaos Walking trilogy whicfh follows Todd and Viola, sometimes together, sometimes apart, as they get sucked into the politics of New Prentisstown and a manufactured war with the Spackle. Whether he wishes it or not Todd gets semi-adopted by the mayor (now President) Prentiss, and begins to follow a dark path even though he resists as much as he can. Viola is swept up in a rebellion of sorts as the women healers go on the rampage, using terror tactics against the mayor and his army. Add to that the arrival of a new scout ship with two of Viola’s old friends, and the impending arrival of thousands of settlers with no other option but to make the planet their home. Complicate all this with the mayor’s mental powers, and the ‘noise’ that all men acquire on exposure to the planet, and this is an excellent conclusion to the trilogy. Humphrey Bower’s reading is excellent. He switches accents and voices seamlessly. There’s a bonus short story, Snowscape, tagged on to the end of this recording.

loup_noir

At my age, you'd think I would know better than to keep working after my wonky back said stop. I never learn. The grasses and weeds are driving me crazy. All that bending and pulling was my first mistake, and the next mistake was listening to Past!me say I could jump back into the fray while still rather broken. Back to floor time, heating pad, and more Ibuprofen than I like to take.

About the only accomplishment I can claim is finishing reading "The Searcher" by Tana French. American cop retires to rural Ireland in hopes of a new life and discovers he's still a cop. French can craft sentences that stop the eye and require re-reading to enjoy them at their fullest. Now I'm suffering a book hangover.

Life, it's all about back and birds right now. The grass has to wait until maybe next Monday.

athenais

The Corflu 42 anthology of fannish writing about music experiences is now available as a link: https://taff.org.uk/ebooks.php?x=Dancing

This is where my own article on the concerts and music I've liked over the years is published. Yes, K-pop makes an appearance, but I don't think it's too dire. And if you didn't know I used to be a Deadhead as well as a Club Kid during the New Wave years, here you go.

rachelmanija

This sequel to one of my favorite books of last year, a young adult post-apocalypse novel with a lovely slow-burn gay romance, fell victim to a trope I basically never like: the sequel to a romance that starts out by breaking up the main couple or pitting them against each other. It may be realistic but I hate it. If the main thing I liked about the first book was the main couple's dynamic - and if I'm reading the sequel, that's definitely the case - then I'm never going to like a sequel where their dynamic is missing or turns negative. I'm not saying they can't have conflict, but they shouldn't have so much conflict that there's nothing left of the relationship I loved in the first place.

This book starts out with Jamison and Andrew semi-broken up and not speaking to each other or walking on eggshells around each other, because Andrew wants to stay in the nice post-apocalyptic community they found and Jamison wants to return to their cabin and live alone there with Andrew. Every character around them remarks on this and how they need to just talk to each other. Eventually they talk to each other, but it resolves nothing and they go on being weird about each other and mourning the loss of their old relationship. ME TOO.

Then half the community's children die in a hurricane, and it's STILL all about them awkwardly not talking to each other and being depressed. I checked Goodreads, saw that they don't make up till the end, and gave up.

The first book is still great! It didn't need a sequel, though I would have enjoyed their further adventures if it had continued the relationship I loved in the first book. I did not sign up for random dead kids and interminable random sulking.

sovay

Thanks to the Canadian wildfires, our sunset light is Pompeiian red, by which I mean mostly the cinnabar and heat-treated smolder of the pigment, but also the implication of volcano.

Because my day was scrambled by a canceled appointment, after I had made a lot of phone calls

spatch took me for soft-serve ice cream in the late afternoon, and once home I walked out to photograph some poppies I had seen from the car.

( Did you love mimesis? )

I can't help feeling that last night's primary dream emerged from a fender-bender in the art-horror 1970's because once the photographer who had done his aggressive and insistently off-base best to involve me in a blackmail scandal had killed himself, all of a sudden the hotel where I had been attending a convention with my husbands had a supernatural problem. Waking in the twenty-first century, I appreciate it could be solved eventually with post-mortem mediation rather than exorcistic violence, but it feels like yet another subgenre intruding that the psychopomp for the job was a WWI German POW.

Current Music: Frog Eyes, "A Library Used to Be (Black Hole and Its Concentrated Edges)"

sartorias

I was taking to a felow customer when I stopped for sandwiches while strolling around downtown Albany last night, and when I commented on the deepeness of the verdure around me--I can't get enough of it--he said that it's been a very wet season here.

I took a walk along the Hudson, stopping at a little side canal, or whatever they are called, when I saw a bridge and inviting shadows (the sun was overly warm and the hair humid and kind of dirty). I snapped this shot:

If it works right, and you embiggen, look just above the top branch of the fallen tree. I'd spotted a pair of geeze swimming toward it, and thought they'd make a splendid shot framed by the two branches. But they never emerged from behind the top one, some twenty feet below me and upstream. I could see the ripples from them paddling, but no sign of the geese.

When I looked closer, I just spotted a black and white goose head peeking at me from beyond that branch. They were clearly waiting for the monster to lurk somewhere else.

And now I'm on my way northwards toward Montreal, which I should reach this evening.

shewhomust

In April 2015, photographer Quintin Lake set off from the steps of St Paul's Cathedral to walk round the coast of the British mainland. Over the next five years, he walked for 454 days; then it took him the best part of five years to sort the photographs - and now, of course, there is a book.

I have spent far too long exploring the many the photographs on Quintin Lake's website, and look forward to spending more.

There's a taster in a BBC 'Set Out' feature. What moment from the walk did the BBC choose to spotlight, leading off the article with it? ( Guess! )

shewhomust

One of the pleasures of quizzing is reaching into the bran tub of your memory and coming out with something that might be a piece of random word-association, but turns out to be the right answer. But sometimes you get spectacular results from something that takes no effort at all. This doesn't seem fair, but that's how it goes.

Last week at the pub quiz, the beer round -

- the beer round is a free-standing round: the marks don't contribute to your overall total, but there is a prize of drinks tokens, provided by the management. Its five questions are given at one time, which gives the Quizmaster a chace to breathe, count the takings, whatever. The questions can be verbal, but are more often pictures, and occasionally music. Scores are often very low, and there is usually a tie-breaker -

- and last week the challenge was to identify five flowers from Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies of the Summer. I went straight through it, writing in the names: honeysuckle, poppy, foxglove, harebell, pimpernel. And I thought the Quizmaster had miscalculated here, and there would be a massive tie-breaker for all the teams scoring five out of five. Admittedly, of all the Flower Fairies books, summer is the one I had as a child, but these surely aren't difficult flowers to identify. The scarlet pimpernel might cause some problems, but ...

Which just shows how much I know. There were three teams (out of 20 - it was a busy week) who scored four, but we were alone is scoring full marks. Which was gratifying, if unexpected. What's more, talking to the Quizmaster afterwards I learned that we were the only team who had identified the harebell: he wasn't sure himself how it differed from the bluebell. It's blue, it's bell-shaped... I didn't tell him that it's also called the Scots bluebell, just that it's a completely different flower: bluebell; harebell. You're welcome.

sovay

I just had my hand dipped in paraffin for a therapeutic procedure and it was so cool. After four immersions in the bracingly hot, clear, slightly soft liquid which reminded me of candle-making in elementary school, it formed a dully livid, slowly malleable coating in which I could see instantly the possibilities of practical effects, although what I actually said as I carefully brought my mannequin hand over to the table where it would be wrapped in plastic and insulated with a towel was, "It's fascinating. I must be quite flammable." The heat lingered much longer in the paraffin than I had expected from the quick-hardening dots and puddles of candlewax and cooled to room temperature without brittling. It had to be rubbed through to be removed. Tragically it did not peel off like a glove into an inverted ghost hand, but it could actually be worked off my wrist and fingers in a coherent thick wrinkle and took none of the small hairs off the back of my hand with it, like its own Vaseline layer. "Your skin is going to be so moisturized," the therapist promised me. I am still getting a referral to a hand specialist, but it was such a neat experience and like nothing I have experienced at a doctor's. It did not trip my sensory wires and made me think of Colin Clive in Mad Love (1935).

Current Music: Jade Bird, "Dreams"

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klwilliams

May 2021

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Page Summary

mrissa - The Witch Roads, by Kate Elliott
shewhomust - Helpful
hrj - Thinking About Camping
larryhammer - “i told this heart of mine our love could never be / but then i hear your voice and something stirs”
sovay - All that skin against the glass
sovay - I stay quiet, but I'm seeing ultraviolet
sovay - It's morphogenesis
shewhomust - Look here upon th's picture, and on this...
sovay - Finally, time to write the book on you
sovay - On Fortuna's wheel, I'm running
jacey - Booklog 38/2025: John Scalzi: When the Moon Hits Your Eye – Audiobook
jacey - Booklog 37/2025: Patrick Ness: Monsters of Men – Chaos Walking #3 – Audiobook
loup_noir - (no subject)
athenais - Dancing To Architecture
rachelmanija - The Only Light Left Burning, by Erik J. Brown: DNF
sovay - I know it made your head spin, what we did with money
sartorias - Northwards
shewhomust - Pictures from the coast
shewhomust - Robert Macfarlane may have a point
sovay - But now I'm a villain, I'm a killer, a dying light

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Reading

The Witch Roads, by Kate Elliott

Helpful

Thinking About Camping

“i told this heart of mine our love could never be / but then i hear your voice and something stirs”

All that skin against the glass

I stay quiet, but I'm seeing ultraviolet

It's morphogenesis

Look here upon th's picture, and on this...

Finally, time to write the book on you

On Fortuna's wheel, I'm running

Booklog 38/2025: John Scalzi: When the Moon Hits Your Eye – Audiobook

Booklog 37/2025: Patrick Ness: Monsters of Men – Chaos Walking #3 – Audiobook

(no subject)

Dancing To Architecture

The Only Light Left Burning, by Erik J. Brown: DNF

I know it made your head spin, what we did with money

Northwards

Pictures from the coast

Robert Macfarlane may have a point

But now I'm a villain, I'm a killer, a dying light

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May 2021

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