skygiants

Thu, 21 May 2026 02:13:27 GMT

So I read the Matthew Stover Revenge of the Sith novelization ---

portico: why
me: i don't have to justify myself

-- but the actual reason is that I didn't want to listen to the A More Civilized Age podcast episodes about it without having read it myself to form my own opinions first, and the approximately eleven hours they spend talking about it gives me two full weeks of podcast time to fill my walk to work. Also I'd heard from a couple different people that it was unexpectedly good!

With affectionate respect to the people who told me this, I did not actually find this to be true. In fact I found the book somewhat worse than I expected. However, it is unexpectedly gay, and I do understand how people can substitute the one thing for the other. If you care about Anakin and Obi-Wan, let me tell you, you are in luck, so does Matthew Stover. If you care about Anakin and Padme -- scratch that. If you care about Padme in any capacity, you are less in luck. This is the most boring I Care About Nothing But Being A Love Interest Padme Amidala that I've ever seen and that includes the Padme in the film, where Natalie Portman is at least attemptiong to project 'I'm trapped in this narrative get me out of here' with her eyes. My frustrations here are exacerbated by having relatively recently read the Mon Mothma book that succeeded (to my mind) in making Mon Mothma a complex and compelling political figure who is often kind of a failure. I would love to see a Padme who's a complex and compelling failure of a political figure, which is the way I think she often comes across in the Clone Wars TV show ... not necessarily on purpose .... but someone could write her that way on purpose ...

But, on the other hand, I had no real reason to expect the Revenge of the Sith novelization could or should be political thriller; this is a book that is 50% fight scene by volume. Indeed the first 30% of the book is One Long Action Sequence. My understanding is that this is because the original script, from which Matthew Stover was working, is also 30% one long action sequence that got cut down to five minutes in the actual film. I'm sorry but this IS very funny, I sympathize deeply with this poor man desperately trying to pad out a lightsaber fight to fill three chapters with extensive discussion of forms like it's the duel in The Princess Bride, only to get to the first screening and go 'god damn it!'

Anyway. It's fine. If they tell you it's a critical text in the Star Wars universe I think you might want to take that with some grains of salt, but then again, I think the most critical text in the Star Wars universe is Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season Two Episode Three: The Solitary Clone so you might want to take anything I say with some grains of salt. But do you want a page of Obi-Wan thinking about Anakin's ass? This book will indeed give that to you.

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Sat, 16 May 2026 12:26:37 GMT

I do think there is a particular charm, a particular interest, in a biographer who is really visibly in love with their subject. Like, you probably wouldn't want it in every biography. But it's nice to know that the author really extremely wants to be there. It gives an enjoyable sort of tension to the reading experience: at what point is the book going to go off-the-rails because the author has spontaneously transmigrated back to 1931 in a doomed attempt to alter the course of history and fix Buster Keaton's Hollywood career with the power of her passion alone? It could happen! It feels like everything has been foreshadowing it!

Obviously Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the of the Twentieth Century does not in fact go off the rails in this way, it does actually remain an interesting and readable biography that uses Keaton's life and career as a jumping-off point to explore the times in which he lived. In the book's introduction, Stevens explains that her fascination with Keaton is such that whenever I heard about something that took place between 1895 and 1966, I found myself trying to fit that event or phenomenon into the puzzle of his life and work. (She also uses the introduction to share a poem she wrote about Keaton. It's not bad!) Anyway, this is a pretty fruitful methodology that leads her to down various side paths to explore not just the history of early cinema but other twentieth-century touchstones such as changing child labor laws, vaudeville and minstrel shows, the rise of Alcoholics' Anonymous, and the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald.*

Often these aren't things that directly impacted Keaton -- Keaton never participated in AA, for example; by the time the program started to gain popularity, Keaton had already hit his rock bottom and come out the other side -- but they run along parallel tracks, such that Keaton's life casts a mirror on the phenomenon or vice versa, or there's an interesting alternate pathway to be imagined where they did indeed intersect. Keaton and Chaplin only worked together once, but you can't help but compare/contrast their trajectories; Keaton and Fitzgerald may never even have met at all, but the downward arcs of their careers were both intertwined with MGM executive Irving Thalberg, on whom Fitzgerald based his last novel.

(Also, it can't have helped with Fitzgerald's fascination, says Stevens, that Thalberg was also extraordinarily good-looking, slight-framed and serious-faced, with large, liquid brown eyes and wavy black hair -- an appearance not unlike that of a certain slapstick comedian whose contract his company had just acquired. We DON'T know they met but we DO know that if they did, Fitzgerald would CERTAINLY have thought Keaton was hot!)

It feels, in other words, like exactly what it is -- a book written by a person whose obsession with one individual has led them down a number of other interesting rabbitholes, to fruitful if not entirely cohesive results. If Keaton had been a fictional character, this might have been a 120K fanfic with a number of beautifully researched, oddly specific chapters. Because Keaton is a real person, we got this book. I had a great time!

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Tue, 12 May 2026 01:36:31 GMT

I don't know that Angela Thirlwell's Rosalind: A Biography of Shakespeare's Immortal Heroine was particularly mind-blowing for me as a text in terms of new knowledge or insights on As You Like It. However, it certainly was satisfying for me to read, in the way it is always satisfying to read a book with someone who passionately agrees with you about a mildly contrarian fannish opinion, like:

Angela Thirlwell: I simply think Rosalind is the absolute top-tier Shakespeare heroine
Me [nodding vigorously]: How true!
Angela Thirlwell: she is so witty and clever and in absolute total narrative control of her text and also doing gender like nobody else in Shakespeare
Me [nodding vigorously]: I think everyone who puts on an As You Like It should read your book!
Angela Thirwell: and As You Like It is a brilliant work that hangs together brilliantly in its entirety
Me [nodding en--pausing]: well I'm not sure I agree entirely with that
Angela Thirlwell: and here's my chapter on Rosalind's Daughters which includes every literary heroine I've ever loved. Elizabeth Bennet is kind of a Rosalind when you think about it.
Me [nodding politely]: I see, I see. Do you have any evidence for that?
Angela Thirlwell: Well, no. But! I believe it in my heart. Because Rosalind is the best!
Me [nodding vigorously]: She's the best!

The part that was probably most interesting for me in terms of actual new thoughts about Rosalind and As You Like It was the contextualization of the play in in terms of when, exactly, it was written, and what other plays it sits alongside in its canonical period, including some that are relatively unfamiliar to me -- I don't actually have a great constant sense in my head of Shakespeare's timeline (other than the obvious TEMPEST IS THE LAST) and the Great Chronological DWJ Project has made me much more interested in tracing the way a train of thought evolves over the course of somebody's work. It's interesting to see Rosalind and Viola as different ways of working out a concept that begins all the way back in Two Gentlemen of Verona; Thirlwell makes much of the fact that Viola is stressed and and serious and poetic whereas Rosalind is almost always speaking in comic prose, and takes charge of her own epilogue. Indeed she never forgets to remind us that Rosalind has the epilogue. You can tell what Thirlwell's favorite bits of the play are because she will quote them at least times in the text in order to prove five different points, blissfully unconcerned with repetition. I personally did not need to return quite so many times to the Bay of Portugal but I guess even the fact that Rosalind speaks the greatest percentage of her play of any Shakespeare heroine [good for her!] does not provide that many Rosalind lines to quote from.

Anyway. Do I think you ought to read this book if not for the pleasure of nodding vigorously along with various enthusiastic statements about Rosalind? Like, do I think it will transform you into a person who nods vigorously along with enthusiastic statements about Rosalind, if you were not one previously? Who could say! Report back if you find out!

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Sat, 09 May 2026 14:44:48 GMT

I have succumbed to peer pressure and started rereading Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy -- well that's not true, I have reread the first book, Assassin's Apprentice, and told myself [lying] I PROBABLY won't go on from here, I just want to remember what's what! But it seems I will in fact be going on from here because to my surprise I thought Assassin's Apprentice was better than I expected or indeed remembered it being and now I want to get to the Liveship Traders trilogy, which is the one I actually actively remember as being good [citation: fourteen-year-old Becca, a notoriously unreliable narrator as we have many times established.]

The thing is I essentially remembered nothing about Assassin's Apprentice because at the time I read it I didn't really know the narrative value of the fraught emotional bond between a protagonist and their mediocre-to-bad mentor and Assassin's Apprentice is NOTHING but mediocre-to-bad mentors. This book is chockablock full of problematic adults intensely projecting their various personal traumas and failures on our young protagonist and attempting to extend him care and guidance through these various highly distorted lenses, and unfortunately their best at its best is never very good but you can't say they're not trying: not really appealing to me at fourteen but delicious to me at forty.

Assassin's Apprentice begins with the arrival of our protagonist on a royal doorstep, age sixish: this kid is the illegitimate son of the famously upright, faithful, virtuous, happily married, non-slutty heir to the throne, Prince Chivalry, and his unknown relatives have decided that it's time for the child to be Chivalry's problem. This immediately and publicly blows up the entire political situation in the country, as Chivalry and his wife subsequently remove themselves from the line of succession and retire to a remote country estate without ever interacting with the child in question.

So that's Fitz, a kid with no official status who's a walking Weird Situation For Everyone. As for his various mediocre mentors, we've got:

Burrich, who was Chivalry's overwhelmingly devoted right-hand man, and due to a one-two-three punch of inconveniently timed injury/Fitz's arrival/Chivalry's retirement has found himself demoted from Heroic Hand of the Heir to the Throne to local stablemaster and accidental foster parent to the kid who blew up his life and his boss'

Chade, the king's assassin, who started from a similar position to Fitz and has been tasked by the king with molding Fitz into just as useful a tool for the royal dynasty as Chade has been for all these years

Verity, Fitz's uncle and the new responsible-but-overwhelmed heir to the throne, a pleasant and dutiful man with minimal emotional intelligence, who is always sort of absently nice to Fitz until the Kingdom's Problems start Eating Him Alive and suddenly things become enjoyably fraught as the potential increasingly arises that perhaps the Kingdom's Problems would eat Verity alive a little less if he let them eat Fitz alive a little more, but he is not going to do that! because he has ethics! but they both know that the possibility is there!!

Lady Patience, Chivalry's wife, who shows up midway through the book when Fitz is a teenager like 'oops possibly this child should have been parented by us? who says you can't fix the failures of the past! I'm doing it right now!'

What I find charming about Lady Patience in particular is that it's really obvious that to Chivalry she was his beautiful carefree manic pixie dream girl and to everyone else she is a nightmare. In fact all these people are sort of nightmares, and they all do care deeply about Fitz, and are also all failing him in important ways that have to do with their own deeply personal blind spots. The book's strength is in the evenhanded way it looks at these people and their strengths and their failures, and lets both the love and the mistakes matter equally.

The book's weakness is in that Robin Hobb apparently decided that since she had all these deeply flawed sympathetic characters, she also needed some actual villains that no one could possibly feel sympathetic about. There's an evil prince who wants to usurp the throne, and there are also some evil pirates who are kidnapping people from the kingdom and turning them into Soulless Monsters, or rather what blotthis accurately describes as video game NPCs that you don't need to feel bad about killing. The fact that Hobb goes to great lengths to explain how everyone is very distraught about the situation and does some failed experiments to ensure that there's no way to turn these people back from being soulless monsters and you really truly don't need to feel bad about killing them really just makes it worse.

Also, I think it's important to note that Robin Hobb really is better than most of her peers at thinking about the practical requirements of domestic animals in a Nineties Eurofantasy environment; the proper care of horses and dogs forms a significant underlying element of the book and occasionally becomes a major plot point, especially since Fitz's Special Secret Skill is dog telepathy [Burrich thinks From Personal Experience this is an evil perversion that will ruin Fitz's life and that he must train out of Fitz as much as possible] [this is definitely not a metaphor for anything] [Robin Hobb wants to know how you could you possibly ask that]. Anyway the flip side of this is that Robin Hobb will Not hesitate to kill a puppy. Never think she won't do it. She has a knife to another puppy's throat right now. ( spoilers )

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Sat, 02 May 2026 22:31:16 GMT

When I say that reading Aster Glenn Gray's Diary of a Cranky Bookworm feels like spending several delightful hours with an old friend, this is just about the least surprising statement in the world I could possibly make, because:

a.) Aster is indeed a longtime friend, and also
b.) both the book and Sage-as-protagonist are drawing explicit inspiration from many other teen-girl-writer bildungsromans (I Capture the Castle, the Montmaray trilogy, the collected oeuvre of LM Montgomery, etc.) that are beloved old friends to me, and also
c.) every character and interpersonal dynamic in this book does indeed feel like an exact portrait of someone I either was or knew in high school, with pitch-perfect and sometimes painful accuracy

Sage Perrault, Our Heroine, is an imaginative, judgmental misanthrope from a small town in Minnesota who was fortunate enough to form a small tight friends group in elementary school who also proved themselves worthy of her affection by being precocious readers:

- Georgie, Sage's best friend since kindergarten, when her mother (terrified of Sage becoming a miserable loner like Gay Cousin Rachel who Never Comes Home For Christmas) seized on the other precocious reader in class and started arranging playdates with feverish speed. Sensible, driven, raised by an overprotective mom who never got out of town and is thus double determined to Get Out Of Town. Friends outside of Sage: church youth group
- Arielle, the dramatic friend, with inattentive divorced parents, a moderate case of main character syndrome, and a rich life of the imagination often expressed through implausible lies about her past. Passionate in her enthusiasms but will not stop obnoxiously sending you fanfiction that you do not care about. Friends outside of Sage: drama club
- Hilary, the chillest friend; always delighted to run with any bit that she's given and make it more fun and funny, but holds her own emotional cards close to the chest. Has a very nice boyfriend and never talks about him. Wonderful to hang out with at any time but is planning for pre-med so will almost certainly be far too busy to stay in close touch with anyone when they scatter. Friends outside of Sage: almost the entire school, everyone loves Hilary because she's a delight, and the fact that she chooses to eat lunch with Sage and Hilary and Arielle is frankly a great compliment to all of them

This has left Sage peacefully free to hold onto grudges also formed in elementary school, continue happily hating the kids in her class that she has hated since they were all eight, and avoid going through the effort of speaking to anybody else. Unfortunately, it's senior year! College is looming, and with it new tensions and unpleasant questions, such as:

- can being a precocious reader really continue as the be-all and end-all of Sage's perception of her own self-worth? and how can she write a college essay about it?
- how much of what Arielle's told them all about her plans for college is normal bad ideas, and how much is outright lies, and how much is in fact a cry for help?
- how can Sage break it to beloved best friend Georgie that she doesn't want to go to the U [University of Minnesota Twin Cities], which is the ultimate apex of Georgie's ambitions, and instead kind of wants to attend a small liberal arts college somewhere in the middle of nowhere?
- but if she doesn't go to college with Georgie, will she ever successfully speak to another human being?
- and on that topic, is it possible that a Longtime Beautiful Enemy is in fact a human being worth talking to, to despite the fact that she's bad at spelling and was mean in middle school?

Sage, early on: Arielle always tries to blow on whatever flickering embers of bisexuality she finds within herself, which I admire. I'd be far more inclined to play Whack-A-Mole. And obviously part of the book is also that Sage has to stop playing Whack-A-Mole, but the big emotional question of the Longtime Beautiful Enemy subplot is less "will they kiss" [though they do, eventually] than "can Sage build an emotional connection with a new person, at the same time as she's facing fundamental shifts in all her other most important relationships?" At its heart this is a book about friendship in all its different shapes, the different kinds of ties you build with different people and the way those change with you as you grow.

And also, of course, about being judgmental about books and films and art. There's a whole other conversation that I feel like I've been coincidentally having in various different contexts about the purpose of the literary cross-reference in this sort of text; I am definitely one of the people for whom there's a profound self-indulgent pleasure in watching characters react to another work [Kage Baker's infamous Cyborgs Watch D.W. Griffith scene my beloved; what a bad idea to spend a whole chapter on it and what a delight it was for me personally] as long as I don't believe that the author believes that all right-thinking people should agree with the character's opinions. Fortunately I am in no danger of this with Sage. Sage has a LOT of opinions about books and films and art, and I disagree with many of them but so do many of Sage's friends; this, too, is one of the important shapes of friendship.

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Sat, 02 May 2026 04:36:36 GMT

Legend of the Magnate is the first historical cdrama I've watched that's interested in the middle class, and for this alone tbh I'd recommend it. The Qing Emperor dies pretty early on and nobody cares except inasmuch as it leads to some national policy changes, because not a single one of our main characters knew him personally!

The year is 1860; the Qing Empire is struggling with the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the ongoing Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion; and our protagonist, Gu Pingyuan, a nice young man with scholarly ambitions from a family of tea farmers, has unfortunately spent his twenties in prison-exile in the frozen north after getting sabotaged by an Unknown Enemy into making criminal amounts of noise at the big civil service exams in the capitol. During his years in exile he has learned various survival skills and at the start of the show he makes his escape so he figure out who sabotaged him, as well as what happened to the long-disappeared father he went to the capitol to seek information about the first place.

Given this setup -- and the fact that the show is a high-budget historical drama that shares several cast members with Nirvana in Fire -- we were kind of expecting Gu Pingyuan to be a master schemer and puppeteer with martial skills and elaborate plans. Not so! It turns out the survival skills that Pingyuan learned in prison mostly included Wheeling, Dealing, Bullshitting, and Occasionally Falling On His Face And Begging. Very refreshing also tbh to see a clever protagonist who has no pride whatsoever. Many times Pingyuan's brilliant schemes to manipulate the market forces around him do succeed! (Often I didn't understand why, because I'm not a financial genius, but I was willing to nod sagely along and agree that they probably were brilliant.) And many other times they result in heavily armed men throwing him in prison because his bullshit immediately backfired on him and he has to wait for someone else to come and rescue him, because he did not in fact acquire any martial arts skills in prison, he leaves that to his love interest.

I should probably at this point talk about the other main characters of the drama. They are:

- his love interest, a nice young woman whose family runs a horse caravan for long-distance deliveries; as this often takes her into somewhat dangerous situations, she's picked up some martial arts skills and low-key considers herself part of the jianghu but in like a normal person way. She's lovely. So is her dad, who loves Gu Pingyuan almost as much as she does. Unfortunately Gu Pingyuan has a pre-prison-exile fiancee that he thinks he's duty-bound to be getting back to and as a result he fumbles her so many times
- his foil, the son of very wealthy merchant, Li Million, who owns a massive chain of pharmacies; as a result before we learned his name we spent several episodes calling him the Heir to CVS. The lonely CVS Junior has a deep and powerful attachment to Gu Pingyuan, and the plot keeps briefly letting them get into joyous financial cahoots and then immediately putting them into rivals situations; every mini-arc includes a scene where Li Million (a major ominously antagonistic figure, played by the Emperor from Nirvana in Fire) is like "I have told you Many times you are Forbidden to associate with that Convict" and CVS Junior stares up at him with big sad eyes and goes "but daddy ... ~~I love him~~ he's my only friend ...."
- his ex-fiancee, who unfortunately for Gu Pingyuan is busy having her own plot, ( which is spoilery )
- his ... hmm I don't really know how to describe Ms. Su in context of Gu Pingyuan as she doesn't actually care that much about him; she's obviously the main character of her own drama that occasionally intersects with this one in which she is a ruthless master puppeteer engaged on her own mysterious business. She appears in the plot every few episodes, often cross-dressed, often waving large amounts of money, occasionally trying to assassinate somebody, and half the time it's like "thank God she's here to help our friend out of prison, we couldn't have done it without her" and the other half the time it's like "well, five men are now dead." You never can tell with Ms. Su!

The show is somewhat interested in politics, but much more interested in how things are made, who makes them, who sells them, and how they get from place to place. At one point some East India Company white guys show up with something ominous under a cloth, and genarti was like "is it a Spinning Jenny?" and the cloth came off and INDEED IT WAS A SPINNING JENNY and we all screamed. The real villain of the story has appeared!

-- though the villain of the story, I want to be clear, is not capitalism. The show wants to be very clear on that. About every three or four episodes it's clearly been mandated by Someone that Gu Pingyuan have a conversation with somebody to reiterate his Ethical Vision for Ethical Business That Truly Serves the People. And when that doesn't happen and when businessmen act badly? That is the fault of the FAILING QING DYNASTY, or possibly the BRITISH, but it is Not the fault of Business, which is Good, and Ethical, and also Patriotic. The last scene of the drama -- this isn't a spoiler, it has nothing to do with the plot of the show in any way -- is a brief post-show epilogue set fifty years in the future where we learn that Gu Pingyuan's business wealth acquired through years of ardent dedication to the free market is of course funding the Communist Revolution.

But the flip side of this dedicated Business Propaganda is that the rest of the show is free to be nuanced, messy, and politically ambivalent. The show doesn't particularly support either the rebels or the Empire; the show just thinks that the civil war sucks for everyone who's caught up in it and makes tea production very difficult. When aristocrats and officials appear in the plot, they're small disruptive typhoons oversetting everything in their wake for the merchant- and working-class people whose lives we're following. Upward mobility is possible, but also perilous; Gu Pingyuan is constantly getting put into glass cliff situations by more powerful people who need a scapegoat, because the Empire is a powder keg and fundamentally our protagonist is just an ex-convict from a tea farming family.

( big major show spoilers )

All this is to say that I enjoyed the show very much, but I do have one -- well, two major complaints. The first is that Gu Pingyuan has a younger brother and in a show where most people broadly do get interesting characterization and growth this brother never once transcends Comedy Status. Earth-shaking revelations are destabilizing the rest of his family to their core and nobody ever bothers to tell him! What is even the POINT of a Comedy Brother if you don't get a moment of shocking and unexpected poignance! Absolute waste.

The second is that there is an arc with Wolves, all of whom seem to have been imported straight into China by way of Hammer Horror. RIP to those many, many monster movie wolves.

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Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:27:53 GMT

It's been several days since I finished Cristina Rivera Garcia's No One Will See Me Cry (translated by Andrew Hurley) and I've still sort of singularly failed to formulate an opinion about it; I just keep sort of mentally picking the book up and turning it over and putting it uneasily down again.

In some ways this book reminds me of A Month in the Country, in that both are historical novels that delicately build up a picture of lives destabilized by and lived in the cracks after an epoch-shaking event, while carefully avoiding -- tracing the parameters of, writing around, turning the camera consistently away from -- the event itself. The difference is that A Month in the Country does in fact feel light, delicate, balanced against the heavy thing at its center, while No One Will See Me Cry isn't in any way a light book; aside from the heaviness of its subject matter, feels laden with symbolism at every turn, although the symbolism itself is often specific and startling.

The premise: in 1920s Mexico City, an aging, morphine-addicted photographer who's been hired to take portraits of asylum inmates meets Matilda, a woman he last photographed many years ago, when she was a prostitute. Joaquin engages in a kind of narrative barter with, first the asylum doctor, then with Matilda herself, in an attempt to understand her story and how it intersects with his own to bring them both to this asylum. Both of them, it turns out, formatively knew and formatively loved the same woman, a revolutionary, in the years before the war -- but neither of them was actually involved in the Revolution, neither of them were active agents for or against the transformation of their livetimes; Joaquin describes himself more than once as the only photographer of his generation who didn't take any photographs of the war, and Matilda was, at the time, involved in an emotional affair with a desert landscape.

There are some tropes that one expects, and is braced for, around Women and Lost Women and Madwomen, especially when insanity is used as a thematic metaphor around national trajectory, especially when all that is inextrictable from questions of poverty and indigineity. Rivera Garcia is definitely deploying some of those tropes with purpose and to a point and I absolutely do not know enough to have a full sense of what she's doing with them. This is one of those situations where I wish I was reading a book in context of a class or a club. As it is, what I'm left with is interest, unease, some beautiful and surprising images, and a sense that I ought to read a lot more about the Mexican Revolution.

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Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:19:54 GMT

I've been meaning for months to write up Knight Flower, the Joseon-era kdrama about a RESPECTABLE WIDOW BY DAY, VIGILANTE BY NIGHT who spends her days dutifully kneeling by her husband's portrait and serving her mother-in-law and her nights running around town in a black mask dispensing justice by the sword.

I enjoyed this drama very much, but it's kind of an odd beast -- it's genuinely interested in the awful constraints on Joseon's women's worlds and widow's worlds in particular and wants to explore that seriously, and it also wants have our heroine be extremely cool and fight off five guys in an alley every episode and toss off a one-liner about it, and it also wants our [middle-aged! widow!] heroine to be a charming sitcom naif who gets comically overcome by the sight of a man's midriff and is shocked! shocked! to learn about some of the various injustices going on in Joseon despite the fact that she's been wandering the streets dispensing vigilante justice for ten years. (They attempt to square some of this circle by virtue of the fact that our heroine's arranged husband was killed! by bandits! on his very wedding day! and so she has spent ten years dutifully mourning a man she never actually met, let alone slept with.)

And because Lee Hanee is a talented actress, she can almost more or less pull all of that off and make RESPECTABLE WIDOW SECRET VIGILANTE JO YEO-HWA a coherent character -- helped in large part by the various interesting women around her, including:

- Yeo-hwa's hard-nosed and cynical maid, whom Yeo-hwa rescued off the streets as a teenager, and who has spent her years since then in the single-minded pursuit of enough money for An Independent Place, which she is going to move into JUST as soon as her chaotic mistress to whom she is unfortunately absolutely loyal is Out Of This Fucking House and No Longer Doing This Stupid Vigilante Shit
- Yeo-hwa's mother-in-law, who holds Yeo-hwa harshly to the extremely narrow line of conduct allowed for widows [go nowhere; speak to no one; serve your husband's family; accept that it's an embarrassment for you to be alive when your husband is dead] and sees her largely as a walking reputational vector for the family -- but hey, at least she would never pressure Yeo-hwa to commit honorable suicide, like some other mother-in-laws-of-widows of their acquaintance, so that's something! In any other drama this character would be a cruel stereotype but in this drama she's played by Kim Mi-kyung with sympathy and complexity; she's the immediate bane of Yeo-hwa's life, and nonetheless she and Yeo-hwa have spent a decade bound together as family with a kind of affection, and Yeo-hwa understands perfectly well that her mother-in-law is also trapped by the only rules she knows
- Yeo-hwa's business partner and accomplice, a merchant whom Yeo-hwa also rescued on the streets and who has also spent the time since then like You Could Just Leave This Fucking House, I will prepare a fake identity for you, it won't be hard
- the main female villain, ( who is somewhat of a spoiler though this all starts to come out pretty early on )

Obviously Jo Yeo-hwa also has a love interest. He's an honorable baby cop who wants to fight corruption and also has a backstory tied up in the ten-years-ago political plot. He's completely fine. His older brother, an upright schemer who's been helping the virtuous king lay long-term plots to take back control from his evil ministers,* has an very cute B-plot bookstore romance with the cynical maid that I frankly found much more compelling in the glimpses of it that we got. More compelling yet ( is spoilers again! )

*there's nothing kdramas love more than a virtuous king who's trying to take back control from his evil ministers

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Sat, 18 Apr 2026 23:43:47 GMT

I have often read single-person biographies where the biographer is very obviously in love with their subject; I have also occasionally read have also read Couple Biographies where the biographer is really invested in the romance between their subjects plural. Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife is a really great, thoughtful, thorough exploration of a particular moment in the history of American slavery around the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the defiant abolitionist movement. It is also very definitively a love story that Woo believes in with her whole heart and is ready to champion all the way to the end, which I honestly think is quite charming even when I myself looking at the evidence was sometimes like "well, I too would like to believe that all through their many years together William and Ellen Craft were indeed fully and romantically on the same page and had each other's backs about everything, but I think it's possible there are other interpretations of some of these events and that in many cases we simply can't know for sure --"

The Big Headline about Ellen and William Craft, the story that made them famous and that the first part of this book recounts in detail, is their daring escape North from slavery in 1848: Ellen disguised herself as an extremely sickly white gentleman who needed her loyal slave with her at all times, and in this guise they managed to navigate 19th-century public transit all the way from Georgia to Philadelphia. They themselves wrote a book about this, which I do plan to read, because it sounds extremely cool and romantic and indeed everyone they met as they made their way from Philadelphia to Massachusetts was like "that's extremely cool and romantic!" and promptly pulled them onto the abolitionist lecture circuit to general wild applause. Ellen, in particular, had major abolitionist propaganda value for forcing empathy out of white people. She was often billed as the White Slave (a label that she did not enjoy.)

Being an escaped slave on the abolitionist lecture circuit was obviously pretty dangerous in 1848 but not as dangerous as it was about to become. In 1848, the Fugitive Slave Laws up north were pretty toothless and unenforceable. In 1850, in an attempt to staple the rapidly-fracturing country back together, significantly stronger laws were passed that essentially forced abolitionist states to cooperate with returning escaped slaves to their masters. Ellen and William Craft, who had so publicly escaped in a way that was very cool and also very embarrassing for the slave states through which they passed, inevitably became one of the first major test cases as to whether Massachusetts would indeed fulfill its Obligations to the South.

Woo writes a compelling narrative, but more importantly she does a really wonderful job balancing that narrative with the complexity of the broader context; from the opening chapter, where she ties the Craft's escape in 1848 with the 1848 revolutionary movement in Europe, I already knew I was in good hands. She does occasionally I think overuse the Ominous Foreshadowing Chapter Ending, but as nonfiction author sins go that's a minor one. She says that at one point in the text that as part of telling their full story she wants to complicate the idea of a happy ending, but it's very clear that in her heart she wants the Crafts to have been very in love and very married all throughout their long and interesting lives, and who can blame her for that?

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Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:35:00 GMT

As I mentioned on my last Pern post, Dragonsdawn was always the most memorable Pern book for me -- for my sins, and sins indeed they are. That said, having reread it, I can understand exactly why I found this so compelling. This was the book that sold me on the fantasy of planetary exploration and colonization as a delightful and desirable experience! You could go to a beautiful new world and discover baby dragons and have random islands named after you! You could build a new Utopian society! Is Anne McCaffrey's vision of a Utopian society uncomfortably libertarian? Sure, but I was ten, I didn't know what libertarians were, I just understood that Sorka was having a very cool time as a happily free-range child exploring the Pernese landscape. I don't think it was until I read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars as an adult that I fully came to terms with the fact that going to space actually sounded like a deeply unpleasant time, logistically speaking, and let the faint wisps of the Dragonsdawn dream of First Feet Down on a beautiful new planet that's functionally just like Earth with bonus charming telepathic fauna dissipate into the ether.

I mean, it is sort of an open question though: early Pernese culture, potential paradise or libertarian cult? I do think McCaffrey knows that the colonist's blissful vision of If Everyone Has Enough Land For Themselves We Can All Just Be Chill And Not Actually Bother Society-Building is doomed to some degree of failure on account of bad actors, even before it's interrupted by Thread. She could have just made it a book about dealing with Thread and developing dragons about it, and it would probably be a better book if she did, but she's so grimly determined to put some bad actors in just to demonstrate she knows they exist. This at least is my theory of how we got Evil Sexy Avril Bitra, perpetrator of history's most inexplicable heist. "If I go on this fifty-year mission, I can steal some diamonds, steal an escape pod, launch myself back out into space, and get picked up back in a society that's moved on a hundred years from the one I left! Probably they'll still want diamonds and I'll re-adapt just fine!"

So, I can understand, I guess, why Avril Bitra. I don't understand and don't think I will ever understand why Avril Bitra's narrative foil is a would-be tradwife who nonconsensually aphrodisiaced her way into marriage with a man who has never shown any romantic interest in anything except cave systems and then spent the next eight years making a shocked Pikachu face about the fact that he continued to not be all that into her. Why is Sallah Telgar's plot in this book? What is it doing here? Why is Avril Bitra evilly torturing Sallah on the spaceship given so much page space and weird psychosexual intensity when literally nothing about this plot actually impacts the colony's situation IN ANY ACTUAL WAY? I thought a reread would leave me less confused about all this than I was when I was ten and in fact I think it did the opposite. Anne, please ... you must have had some thoughts about this, thematically, structurally ... I'm coming to you, hat in hand, asking for answers.

I do think it's very funny that in the years between 1968 and 1989 Anne McCaffrey decided that it was a bit embarrassing that she'd built biological differences into her dragons such that the queens don't breathe fire, and decided to blame it on the fact that the dragons were genetically designed by an Extremely Traditional Chinese Grandma instead. Is it also racist? Yes, extremely. But if we start talking about all the unfortunate well-meaning racism in Dragonsdawn we'll be here all day and I don't have that much day left. Racism aside I did find myself unexpectedly somewhat moved by the subplot I did not remember at all in which Kenjo Fusaiyuki, a guy who has made a Profound Mistake in moving to an isolated colony planet that's dedicated itself to being low-tech and abandoning spaceflight, desperately hoards fuel for as long as possible to put off the time when he will have to at last give up for good and all the thing he loves most and is best at in all the world.

And you know who could've saved Kenjo Fusaiyuki's life, if she had stopped to help the two guys Avril Bitra clonked on the head instead of uselessly pursuing her into space? YES, IT'S ANOTHER SALLAH TELGAR CRIME. Sallah Telgar, you have so much to answer for.

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Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:52:54 GMT

Scorched Earth is described on its website as a piece of dance theater about a detective reopening an Irish cold case, a description which fascinated us so much that we made a second patently absurd decision to once again park in NYC just exactly long enough to see a show before continuing on our multi-state travel.

If you'd forced me to describe what I expected from this show, I would have hazarded something like 'Tana French book, adapted as a ballet?' Not at ALL correct. The cold case is not a mystery, not full of twists: we've got one detective, one suspect, one victim, one piece of land (and one ambiguously metaphorical donkey.) The ninety-minute show begins with a series of projected documents explaining the history of Irish Land Dispute Murders before establishing a more-or-less regular pattern: short interrogation scenes between the detective and the suspect, interspersed with bursts of emotion and memory, some dramatized and some in dance.

Sometimes -- often -- this worked extraordinarily well. The land under dispute is represented, personified, by a dancer in a ghillie suit who slithers in and out of the central interrogation/morgue table* like a giant muppet, or the Swamp Thing and dances a violently romantic duet with the suspect -- and it could have looked so silly, as I'm describing it it sounds silly, and instead it was haunting and evocative, perfectly elucidating the narrative themes of the show while also just being a gripping and powerful piece of performance.

*remarkable piece of set design, that table; afterwards we all agreed it was the hardest-working table in show business

Other times, the balance felt a little off; the dialogue would tell us something and then a duet would be danced and I'd think, well, you didn't need to tell us both ways, one or the other would have worked fine. Or I'd start to admire the dialogue for its spareness in suggesting the complexity of a dynamic -- who's from here, who isn't, who has rights to land, who doesn't, what's worth punishing on behalf of the community, what isn't -- and then it say it again more explicitly and I'd be like, well, okay, but you didn't have to. What I'm saying is that I think the show probably could have been just as powerful at sixty minutes as at ninety minutes. But I wasn't at all unhappy to be there for ninety minutes! I was compelled the whole time! If the show sometimes told me things about the situation more times or more explicitly than I needed to hear them, it did an admirable job of not telling me what to think about them, and trying to decide what I did think about them left me plenty to occupy my mind.

A lot of the creative team seem to have a history with Punch Drunk and have worked on Sleep No More explicitly, and it was interesting for me to compare/contrast -- the style of expressive choreography is notably similar, but Sleep No More is a piece of theater that has almost no dialogue, that draws a lot of its power from being oblique and ambiguous to the point of fault. Finding that exact right point of convergence for dance and theater seems to be an ongoing challenge and point of interest for the people coming out of the Punch Drunk school and I'm very curious to see other explorations of it.

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Fri, 10 Apr 2026 03:01:33 GMT

Made a extremely silly decision this past weekend, which was to break up our long drive to and from Philly by Exactly long enough to see one (one) show in NYC on the way down, and another on the way back. Literally put the car in a garage by the theater, went into the show, got the car out of the garage, and kept driving. And to make matters even sillier the show that we saw on the way down was Bad -- and we knew it was going to be! Or at least we had a reasonable suspicion! But were we not going to go out of our way to see Norm Lewis play Villefort in a Count of Monte Cristo musical? Of course we were. The path before us had simply been prepared.

Q: When you say it was bad, do you mean it was a bad musical as a musical, or a bad adaptation of Count of Monte Cristo?
A: Oh, both! Absolutely both.

Q: What made it a bad musical?
A: Well, the music. And the lyrics. They hit exactly every beat on the Musical Sheet while constantly feeling like less subtle knockoff versions of other songs you might know slightly better. The song you might know slightly better is not a subtle one, you say? Well, I guarantee you that songs such as "Dangerous Times," in which the full cast explain that they are living in dangerous times, and "How Did I Get So Far Away [From Me]," in which Mercedes sadly wonders how she has gotten so far away from herself, are less so. When the best you can say of a song is that it felt like pallid diet Frank Wildhorn -- as in, lacking the noted power and vibrancy of real Frank Wildhorn, composer of such deathless works as Death Note: The Musical -- then you know we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. And that's not even mentioning the frenetic stream of mediocre jokes.

Q: And what made it a bad adaptation?
A: I mean I know there are probably people in the past who have said that Edmond Dantès literally did nothing wrong but I want you to understand: in this show, Edmond Dantès literally does nothing wrong. His backstory takes up the entire first act, and by the time we hit intermission I was already like "huh, there's not going to be a lot of time in here for revenge schemes," but I didn't actually understand how dire the situation was going to be until ( this part of the Q&A gets into quite detailed plot spoilers )

Q: So do you regret your objectively silly decision to go out of your way to see this musical?
A: No I do not, not in the least, and I would have regretted missing it. There is something very nutritious in bad theater, I think. It forces you to consider what good theater might look like. Also, the surprise appearance of Lucrezia Borgia was one of the funniest things I experienced all weekend.

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Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:33:04 GMT

I have a stack of library books and used bookstore buys looking at me accusingly but instead I have been lured into doing a massive McCaffrey read. I know. I don't respect my choices either.

My other problem is that once I am embarked on a Text I have a hard time stopping it, so when all the library offered me in ebook was an omnibus of Dragonflight - Dragonquest - The White Dragon I was always going to be reading all three. And, you know, it did start out quite well! Rereading Dragonflight a very funny experience because it's like

Dragonflight: and here's where Lessa washes her hair
Me: tiny Becca what do you think about this
the inner tiny Becca: I LOVE LESSA I LOVE IT WHEN SHE GETS TO WASH HER HAIR 🥹
Dragonflight: and here's where F'lar sends F'nor on a haunted mission back in time
Me: tiny Becca what do you think about this
the inner tiny Becca: who's F'lar

But actually with very few actual memories and a lot of informed knowledge from the twenty years since the last time I read these books I truly expected F'lar and the central romance plot in general to be ... worse? Like yes it's 1968 and yes there's the dubcon dragonsex of it all and yes F'lar's whole mission in life is to convince the world that you Cannot stop feeding the military-industrial complex even after four hundred years of peace or you Will be eaten by mindless alien hordes [On Which More Later]. But the thing that the dubcon dragonsex actually does, narratively speaking, is it fully displaces the emphasis of the romance away from 'when are they going to have sex' to 'when are these two assholes who trust themselves very much going to learn to trust each other.' They're having sex all through it; the dragons have taken care of that, so the sex is no longer the point. The partnership and the problem-solving is the point, and it is fun to watch them solve problems and increasingly know which problems they can rely on the other to solve. Which I think is interesting and purposeful and honestly pretty bold, for 1968! I'd like to see more romances do that now! Also the problem-solving is satisfying, and haunted mission back in time plot that I had completely forgotten is quite effectively creepy. I ended Dragonflight like 'you know what, as Of Its Time as it is, in many ways this book actually does really work. Maybe ... Pern is good?

Then on to Dragonquest and The White Dragon and it turns out Pern unfortunately is not good, although both of these books are real would-be-good-if-they-were-good situations.

Dragonflight: and here's where F'lar sends F'nor on a haunted mission back in time
me: Dragonquest what do you think about this
Dragonquest: what haunted mission

No, Dragonflight is kind of a mess of a book but what I do think is interesting about it, thematically speaking -- to come back to the military-industrial complex of it all -- is that the end of Dragonflight is a lot of people going 'to be manly and heroic is to fight forever on a cool dragon, we've reached peacetime and it's dull so we're going forward in time so we can continue fighting forever on a cool dragon' and the beginning of Dragonquest is like 'actually I have reconsidered my thinking about this and it turns out fighting forever is perhaps bad for you, psychologically? maybe instead of heroic forever war we can look at some alternate pursuits that are also heroic and manly but less lethal and traumatizing. Like space exploration! Did anyone watch the Moon Landing? Wasn't that pretty cool?' (genarti when I was talking with her about this also pointed out that at the time Dragonquest came out we were also several more years into Vietnam.) Obviously McCaffrey is all in on the Pioneer Spirit and the wistful terra nullius of it all but I appreciate that she's actively revising her thoughts on the military and its relationship to the populace it theoretically protects as she's writing it, and it's interesting to see the evolution. Really really funny to see F'lar go from the 'SEND TITHES LIKE YOU DID IN THE DAYS OF YORE' guy to the 'I'm your progressive candidate for Weyrleader and I think this military appropriationism has gotten a bit out of hand' guy. I love the end of the book where it's like 'well we've actually solved the problem of Thread but unfortunately our solution is not cool and sexy, so we need a dragonrider to do something that is cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless to get everyone else to buy into it.'

(E who dragged me into this: plausible reading that the grubs are a feminised solution. we must put our hands into mother earth and urgh it's all moist and gooey
me: i love that you went there because my first thought is that the solution is lower class. the humblest tillers of the land
E, determined: thread is being absorbed by a planetary vagina dentata which also has life-generating properties)

Anyway, F'nor does some spaceflight, in a cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless way, which is making up I suppose for the other cool and sexy thing that F'nor absolutely does not get to do which is challenge dragon biological essentialism. F'nor/Brekke is not a particularly successful or interesting romance plot but nonetheless I truly was on the edge of my seat for this -- I remembered that Brekke's mating flight ends in Tragedy but I thought F'nor might at least like succeed a little bit in proving that it's hypothetically possible for a brown dragon to mate with a queen? But no! he doesn't even get to try! Having raised the question of 'what does dragon gender really mean and how much does it bind us' Anne cannot bring herself to answer it. Have you instead considered that spaceflight is cool and sexy.

And The White Dragon is even more a book of 'having raised the question, Anne cannot bring herself to answer it.' Not much actually happens in The White Dragon, we're making a number of mountains out of molehills, but it's all whirling around the central anxiety point of 'if my soulbonded dragon falls out of standard dragon color/gender categories and moreover is definitely ace then what does that make me?' And the book's answer is '....a guy. A manly guy who successfully achieves all of his society's standards of masculinity. Do not worry about it.' Well, I wouldn't have been worrying about it, Anne, if you hadn't been telling me to worry about it, and then you gave me the most boring answer possible.

There is more to say about The White Dragon -- not least the way that every woman in the book seems to have gotten a hefty splash from the misogyny fountain -- but I am running out of time so we'll call it here. Am I done? No! I am now halfway through Dragonsdawn. More on that anon.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2026 14:56:45 GMT

I've seen two Boston Ballets in relatively quick succession over the past month, both combo programs featuring two pieces; the first was "The Rite of Spring" (Elo's, not Nijinsky's) paired with Pite's "The Seasons' Canon," and the second was a premiere, Stromile's "The Leisurely Installation of a New Window," paired with Ashton's "The [Midsummer Night's] Dream."

Breaking with the actual curation of the productions, I'm going to talk about "The Rite of Spring" and "The Leisurely Installation of a New Window" together because they both came first in their productions, they had kind of similar vibes, and I experienced similar feelings of mild disappointment about both of them that were not technically the fault of the productions. I was really excited about "The Rite of Spring" because I wanted to see some ballet dancers do a dramatic ritual sacrifice, and I was really excited about "The Leisurely Installation of a New Window" because I wanted to see some ballet dancers slowly install a window. Instead, both of these pieces were kind of abstract explorations through dance of the Relationship between the Individual and Society, and I think both would have been enjoyable for fifteen minutes but ran a bit long at half an hour.

The description for "Window" in the playbill reads:

Eighteen dancers inhabit the work through distinct but interdependent roles. The Seeker stands close to tradition, moving with discipline and clarity. The People operate within shared systems, attentive to both order and its quiet tensions. The Reformers introduce disruption, not as spectacle, but as pressure applied from within.

This did help me understand better what was going on in the dance, as the Seeker stalked around holding a book and then portentously passed it off to some dueting Reformers, but also made it feel a bit like a LARP that I was not participating in. On the other hand Reeves Gabriel of The Cure was There and Participating in Ballet Music (and every bit of marketing wanted you to know that Reeves Gabriel Of The Cure was There and Participating in Ballet Music) and occasionally the music would get very thrillingly electric guitar and you'd be like "Hello, Reeves Gabriel of The Cure!" So it's not that I didn't have a fine time, I just would have been okay with somewhat less of that time.

However, after these very mildly disappointing openers, I loved both "The Seasons' Canon" and "The Dream" very much! The Seasons' Canon is, justifiably, a known Boston Ballet showstopper -- a huge piece with a huge cast, and as you guys know I often have trouble with a piece that is not trying to tell me a story but this piece is truly just Humans Make Big Shapes and it's riveting. Could not take my eyes off it. The trailer here gives a bit of a sense but of course is not that much like seeing it Actually On Stage, but it does let you see one of the things I found most striking about the piece which is how extremely non-gendered it is -- everyone on that stage is dressed identically in pants and nude tank that makes them look topless, the whole corps looks like one and moves like one and there is nothing to distract you from that. Really, really cool experience.

And "The Dream" -- look, I'm a simple soul, and what I have discovered is that I love Ashton's silly panto-esque ballets. They are fun and they are funny and I love it when people get to be funny in dance! Dance jokes are good actually! Titania ballet-hopping her way towards Bottom in a way that manages to be simultaneously fairy-like and hilariously sultry, the arguing lovers constantly picking each other up and pirouetting a partner firmly Away from them Thank You, the rude mechanicals!! we wanted more rude mechanicals but I was so glad we got what we got. A+ Midsummer Night's Dream, would see again.

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Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:17:57 GMT

Because Becky Mahoney and I know each other, I boosted a Bluesky giveaway for her upcoming vampire novel Thrall (coming out next month!) in the spirit of friendship and then was somewhat surprised to discover that I had in fact won the giveaway -- surprised but delighted, obviously, since I've loved all of her previous books even when they weren't LUCY CENTRIC DRACULA RIFFS!! focused around a COLLEGE PIRATE RADIO STATION!!!

The central character of Thrall is Lucy Easting, who has just transferred into beautiful, isolated, mountainside Rollins University from community college, in a bid to get away from her stressed and depressed mother and live a life she's excited about for a change.

Alas! her first college party results in a couple of neck puncture marks, a marked tendency to experience severe migraines in sunlight, and a tragic susceptibility to the ominous vampire voice in her head that occasionally takes over her consciousness and directs her towards uncharacteristic action.

Fortunately! the college is full of prospective allies who are willing to take a chance on Lucy despite her regrettable thrall situation, including but not limited to the host of the local college late-night radio show, who has been a target of the vampire since her sophomore year and has been using the airwaves to try and fight back; Lucy's RA, a determined young woman with very nice arms, who came to the school to investigate after a terrible fate befell her high school ex-boyfriend Jonathan; and the very nice, normal party host who has no previous vampire experience but feels just terrible about the whole situation and is not about to relinquish responsibility for sorting the situation out! it was her party!!

It's a really charming book on a number of levels, but my favorite thing about it as a Dracula riff specifically is how much it's thematically invested in Lucy as a side character -- the narrative is consistently very clear that the vampire is not particularly interested in Lucy; he's obsessed with Athena the radio show host and everything else he's doing is part of his elaborate cat-and-mouse game with her, including incidentally overturning Lucy's life as a by-the-by -- and how Lucy makes the book her own story anyway by sheer force of determination not to be cut out of it. Lucy's energy really drives the book: she wants to live, and she wants to live a life on her own terms, and she's not about to let one horrible encounter take that away from her.

Also, I think it's not a huge spoiler ( but I guess is technically a mild one: lesbians! )

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Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:47:53 GMT

Sometimes you read a book at exactly the wrong time, and you're like 'god this stupid big fat fantasy novel. Why are you six hundred pages. Why is everybody Sexy. What's the point of you. I'm tired' and sometimes you read a book at exactly the right time and you're like 'thank god! actual worldbuilding!! somebody had a good time getting weird with this! please tell me more about how weird you're getting!!' and I think I could easily have gone either way on Tessa Gratton's The Mercy Makers depending on the four books I'd read just previous as well as the time of the moon. But as it happened, at the point I read it I was really hungering for something, ANYTHING that felt like it actually cared about depicting a unique and distinctive society with characters that felt like they actually belonged in that society, and The Mercy Makers gave me that in spades, so I ended up really high on it! I had a great time! Please understand that I mean it lovingly when I say that it felt like a visual novel high fantasy dating sim!

-- this is a bit disingenuous for me to say, I haven't actually played more than a bit of any of the long visual novel high fantasy dating sims I'm thinking of, but I have read extensively through alias_sqbr's write-ups of them and the book profoundly reminded me of something like [alias_sqbr's description of] My Vow To My Liege, where a player character has to play a lot of really dramatic political games to decide the fate of the kingdom, while surrounded by Hot People, and different elements of the plot will play out depending on which Hot Person she's closest to --

Okay, so we are in a fantasy empire that is built around a central religion that values Balance and forbids Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques. Our heroine Iriset, of course, is an atheist who's wildly gifted with Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques, and is also the daughter of a criminal mastermind. Iriset and her father have carefully crafted a secret identity illusion so that everyone thinks that someone else is the Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery Mad Scientist Genius and that the famous criminal mastermind's daughter is just a nice girl who's not really involved, so that when her father eventually gets arrested -- as indeed is the inciting incident of this book -- Iriset can hopefully stay free and rescue him instead of also getting arrested herself as a famous magical heretic.

For some reason, however, after her father's arrest, Iriset -- whom everyone knows is a criminal heiress but, once again, thinks is a nice and sweet criminal heiress who's not really involved, rather than an amoral heretic mad scientist -- is sort of non-consensually invited to become one of the handmaidens of the Emperor's hot sister as part of complex political schemes, so she spends the rest of the book in the palace, where she meets the following hot people:

- the Emperor, an earnest and well-intentioned young man who is really devoutly religiously dedicated to maintaining the Balance of the Status Quo
- the Emperor's sister, Iriset's boss, whose job as per official tradition for the Emperor's sibling is to be a priestess who placates the religion's divine devil-figure by going and being really sexy at a shrine every day, but has political visions and ambitions for the Empire far beyond her Sexy Role
- the Emperor's fiancee, a very sweet princess from neighboring island kingdom, who is a fundamental element of the Emperor's sister's overarching plans for an empire that expands through marriage alliance instead of conquest
- a mysterious, suffering, untrustworthy fairy sort of creature who has been publicly imprisoned behind the Emperor's throne for the past several hundred years and is now just sort of a standard part of the decor

In addition to these obviously romanceable characters, Iriset also has an existing criminal boyfriend on the outside of the palace who she's attempting to get in touch with and coordinate with about Operation Rescue Her Dad, and she also meets a palace maid and a fantasy-nonbinary magical architect (uses one of several archaic gender forms) who in the dating sim version of this would probably be secret or hidden routes.

The first, like, two hundred pages or so of this six hundred page book are mostly just Iriset wandering around the palace, trying not to be too obviously a heretical mad scientist, building various schemes for father-rescue and trying not to get distracted by much she would quite like to bang any or all of these hot people. And, again, at another time I might have gotten bored, but at this point in time I was really just enjoying the slow rich worldbuilding. It's weird! It's interesting! Everyone always wears elaborate masks and facepaint except for the foreign princess who's confused by the whole system, and we've reinvented a different kind of four humors system so everybody's like 'well of course she would act this way, she's got too much ecstatic force in her system', and the political conversation about marriage reform refers to the law that forbids conquered peoples within the Empire from marrying within their own ethnic group for a certain number of generations, and there are several archaic genders that are no longer used and people have chat about how actually we should bring them back because two is an imbalanced number and four would be much more balanced -- what I'm trying to get at is that it feels like the people in this book think in ways that are shaped by their world, and not by ours. The plot in its actual happenings is constantly contriving itself so that Iriset will be pushed into a position where, eventually, she'll have to Rebel Against Empire, but the thought patterns that get us there feel distinctive and grounded in the world and setting that Gratton has built.

But eventually, of course, we are going to have to get some plot and it is obviously going to have to involve Chekhov's Heretical Plastic Surgery and messy identity porn. ( the rest is spoilers )

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Fri, 20 Feb 2026 13:19:26 GMT

One of the simplest and purest pleasures in fiction is to ride along as an unhappy person becomes happier, and this at the heart is the charm of the self-pub coming-of-trans novel Our Simulated Selves.

On first glance the premise of this one could seem dire: depressed incel, told by dream girl that they would not date even if the incel was the "last man on Earth," uses advanced brain-scanning technology and giant quantum supercomputer to set up a simulation world where literally everybody else on Earth does disappear immediately after that argument, and see how long it takes sim self and dream girl to get together in this apocalypse scenario. (The reader, who has already seen our protagonist describe dysphoric brain fog and experience mysterious joy about playing a girl character in D&D, will at this point certainly have some ideas about the ways that this sad incel is working from some fundamentally incorrect principles.)

Most of the book is from the POV of sim protagonist with occasional outside-world interjections and responses from the simulation runner, which means you also get sort of a fun inside/outside view of an apocalypse-ish survival situation -- within the simulation, protagonist and dream girl are running around gathering up non-perishable food and trying to figure out how long the power grid is going to last; meanwhile, outside the simulation, Protagonist Zero Version is like 'shit, I didn't really think through that they'd be treating this like an apocalypse and I forgot to write any code for food spoilage!' But the main satisfaction of the book is in watching our protagonist go through the work of transformation to become a better and happier person -- with a little added weight, because at the same time we're also seeing the worst and cruelest and most unhappy version. Overall I found the reading experience really charming and sweet!

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Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:04:58 GMT

I never got around to writing up Anne McCaffrey's The Mark of Merlin when I read it last year, but I've been thinking about McCaffrey a lot recently due to blitzing through the Dragons Made Me Did It Pern podcast (highly recommended btw) and osprey_archer asked for a post on my last-year-end round-up so now seems as good a time as any.

The important thing to know about The Mark of Merlin is that -- unlike many of the things I've read recently! -- it is not, in any way, the least little bit, Arthuriana. They are not in Great Britain. There are no thematic Arthurian connections. There is absolutely zero hint of anything magical. So why Merlin? Well, Merlin is the name of the heroine's dog, and he's a very good boy, so that's all that really needs to be said about that.

Anyway, this is McCaffrey writing in classic romantic suspense mode a la Mary Stewart or Barbara Michaels, and honestly it's a pretty fun time! Our Heroine Carla's father Tragically Died in the War, so he asked his second-in-command to be her guardian and now she's en route to stay with Major Laird in his isolated house in Cape Cod. Tragically scarred and war-traumatized Major Laird has no Gothic-trope concerns about this because Carla's full name is Carlysle and her dad accidentally forgot to tell him that the child in question was a daughter and not a son; Carla is fully aware of the mixup and but has not chosen to enlighten him because she thinks it's extremely funny to pop out at Major Laird like "ha ha! You THOUGHT I was a hapless youth and wrote me a patronizing letter about it, but INSTEAD I am a beautiful and plucky young co-ed so joke's on you!"

There is an actual suspense plot; the suspense plot is that Someone is hunting Carla for reasons of secret information her dad passed on in his luggage before he died, and also his death was under Mysterious Circumstances, and so we have to figure out what's going on with all of that and eventually have a big confrontation in the remote Cape Cod house. But mostly the book is just Carla and the Major being snowed in, romantically bickering, huddling for warmth, cooking delicious meals over the old Cape Cod stove, etc. etc. Cozy in the classic sense, very little substance but excellent for reading in a vacation cottage while drinking tea and eating a cheese toastie.

As a sidenote, I did not know until I started listening to Dragons Made Me Do It that McCaffrey's Dragonflight preceded The Flame and the Flower, the book that's credited as being the first bodice-ripper romance novel and launching the genre of historical romance as we know it today, by a good four years. It's interesting to place this very classic romantic suspense novel -- which was published almost a decade after Dragonflight, but, at least according to this Harvard student newspaper article I turned up, at least partially written in 1950 -- against the full tropetastic dubcon-at-best dragonsex Pern situations, which clearly belong to a later moment. And speaking of later moments, it's also a bit of a mindfuck for me to think very hard about McCaffrey's place in genre history and realize how very early she is. I was reading McCaffrey in the nineties, against Lackey and Bujold. Reading her in conversation with Russ and LeGuin is a whole different experience.

But this is all a tangent and not very much to do with The Mark of Merlin, a perfectly fun perfectly fine book, very short on the wtf moments that have characterized most of my experiences with McCaffrey, and if anything comes late to its moment rather than early.

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Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:37:07 GMT

Syr Hayati Beker's What A Fish Looks Like is perhaps the weirdest/coolest/most interesting thing I've read so far this year -- an apocalyptic collage novel(la), told in letters, posters, angry breakup notes, and a series of strange fairy tale riffs about breakups and loss and change and transformation on both the personal and the planetary level.

In the frame story for What A Fish Looks Like, a queer radical collective in a city living through massive climate collapse has gotten its hands on 100 tickets for the last big trip off-planet. It's T minus ten days: who's going? Who's staying? Who heard the gossip about Jay and Seb making out on the dance floor, even though they had a really messy breakup and Jay has a ticket out and Seb has no interest in leaving, and who wants to use the Saga of Jay and Seb to distract themselves from the fact that the oceans are rising and the skies are red and this year's bad fire season never ended?

In the interstitials, a community outlined in personal letters and party invites and notes on the bathroom door of a favorite bar counts down to the point of decision. In the stories themselves, a person has a bad break-up and and takes on some polar bear DNA about it; a closeted teacher loses a student to a big wave in the new and frightening ocean, and meets a mermaid about it; a stage manager forges ahead with a production of Antigone in a burning city and turns into a spider about it. The people who appear in the stories also appear in the interstitials, part of the community; the book is slippery about to what degree the stories are meant to be read literally as an accounting of events and to what degree they're metaphors, wishes, retellings. The interstitials make it clear that there is certainly a theater and a fire. Probably nobody actually turned into a spider about it, but who could say. The world is getting weirder, and who knows what's possible or plausible anymore?

I'm including a screenshot of one of my favorite pages of the book -- most of the stories are text but a lot of the interstitials are in images like this one -- which I think gives a good sense of the kind of community portraiture that makes What A Fish Look Like stand out so much to me.

Highly recommend checking this one out: you might be confused, you might be depressed, you might be inspired, you absolutely won't be bored.

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Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:52:43 GMT

I went into Lessons in Magic and Disaster somewhat trepidatiously due to the degree to which her YA novel Victories Greater Than Death did not work for me. The good news: I do think Lessons in Magic and Disaster is MUCH better than Victories Greater Than Death and actually does some things remarkably well. The bad news: other elements did continue to drive me up a wall ....

Lessons in Magic and Disaster centers on the relationship between Jamie, a trans PhD student struggling to finish her dissertation on 18th-century women writers at a [fictional] small Boston college, and her mother Serena, an abrasive lesbian lawyer who has been sunk deep in depression since her partner died a few years back and her career simultaneously blew up completely.

Jamie does small-scale lower-m magic -- little rituals to make things go a little better in her life, that usually seem to work, as long as she doesn't think about them too hard -- and the book starts when she takes the unprecedented-for-her step of telling her mother about the magic as a sort of mother-daughter bonding ritual to see if her mother can use it to help herself get less depressed! Unfortunately Serena is not looking for a little gentle self-help woo-woo; she would like to UNFUCK her life AND the world in SIGNIFICANT ways that go way beyond what Jamie has ever done with magic and also start blowing back on Jamie in ways that eventually threaten not only Jamie and Serena's relationship but also Jamie's marriage, Jamie's career, and Serena's life.

Serena is an extremely specific, well-observed character, and Serena and Jamie's relationship feels real and messy and complicated in ways that even the book's tendency towards therapy-speak couldn't actually ruin for me, because yeah, okay, I do think Jamie would sometimes talk like an annoying tumblr post, that's just part of the characterization and it doesn't actually fix everything and sometimes even hurts. But the book's strengths -- that it's grounded very much in a world and a community and a type of people that Charlie Jane Anders clearly knows really well and can paint extremely vividly -- are also its weaknesses, in that it's also constantly slipping into ... I guess I'd call it a kind of lazy-progressive writing? The book is full of these sharp, vivid, messy moments whenever it's focused on this particular relationship and Serena in specific, and without that flashpoint, the messiness vanishes. Jamie goes into her grad school classroom and thinks about how the white men are always so annoying but the queer and bipoc students Always pick up what she's putting down. Jamie's partner Ro sets down boundaries in their marriage after a magic incident goes wrong and they are Always right and Jamie is Always humble and respectful about it, because respecting boundaries is Always the Correct thing to do. (Ro is the sort of person who says things like "this is bringing back a lot of trauma for me" while Jamie's mother is actively, in that moment, on the verge of death. I'm all for honesty in relationships but maybe you could give it a minute?)

I don't know. I think there is quite a good book in here, but I also think that good book is kind of fighting its way a little bit to get out from under the conviction that We Progressive Right-Thinking People In The Year 2025 Know What Righteous Behavior Looks Like. You know. But sometimes it does indeed succeed!

I did really enjoy the book's hyper-local Cambridge setting. Yeah, I see you name-checking those favorite restaurants, and yes, I have been to them and they are pretty good. Also, as a b-plot, Jamie is uncovering some lesbian literary drama in her dissertation that gives Charlie Jane Anders a chance to play around with 18thc pastiche and write RPF about Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and Charlotte Clarke and sure, fine, I didn't know very much about any of those people and she has very successfully made me want to know more! There were a bunch of times she'd drop something int he book and I'd be like "that's SO unsubtle as pastiche" and then I'd look it up and it was just a real thing that had happened or been published, so point again to Charlie Jane Anders.

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Wed, 11 Feb 2026 13:38:26 GMT

Picking up a book called Part Time Girl about a high school kid who switches (physically, magically, inconveniently) back and forth between Being A Boy and Being A Girl, I was like, okay, I know pretty much what the vibes of this are going to be. And the first couple chapters in which protagonist Michael/Kayla worries about a Sort Of Girlfriend and a Hot Boy and I Have Taken This Part Time Job As A Girl But Now I Need Girl Clothes, Bra Shopping! So Stressful!! did not really lead me to think anything different!

Then about 40% of the way through the book our protagonist was suddenly running through the woods from evil wizards, and I'm like, okay, this I did not expect.

It turns out the plot of this book is NOT high school drama and figuring out your complicated gender feelings! The plot of this book is that evil racist homophobic wealthy wizards called the Clan (yes) run the world and you have to team up with your traumatized neighbor to fight them, while also figuring out your complicated gender feelings along the way.

Also, the protagonist and the traumatized neighbor bond by hanging out and watching the 2014 kdrama Healer, the plot and cast of which is lovingly described in text. This is in fact plot relevant because they later use their arguments over which cast member is hotter to prove their identities to each other when it's in question. Now I do love Healer but given that it came out, again, in 2014 and I haven't heard anyone talk about it pop culturally in more than a decade, this possibly surprised me even more than the evil wizards.

I can confidently say that at no point did I predict some of the major turns this book took, and I will put them under a spoiler in case you, too, would like to experience this Experience as I confidently believe it was meant to be Experienced: ( here we go! for the ride! )

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Mon, 09 Feb 2026 03:03:07 GMT

By sheer coincidence, I ended up reading Alix Harrow's The Everlasting almost immediately after The Isle in the Silver Sea. Both books are ringing changes on the same big themes -- the narratives of nationalism, fate and tragedy, Spenser and Malory, depressed lady knights and evil girlbosses -- and from what I had previously read of both Harrow and Suri's work I was tbh quite surprised to find myself liking The Everlasting a bit better.

The premise of The Everlasting: it's more or less the second-world equivalent of the 1920s and we have just had a Big War. Our protagonist Owen has a radical pacifist alcoholic father that he doesn't respect, a war medal that he didn't really earn, a academic career that doesn't seem to be going places, and a face that makes it pretty obvious that at least one parent came from The Other Side. However, his messy relationship with the war has not in any way altered his ardent passion for the greatest figure of his country's nationalist mythology, the knight Una Everlasting, who fought at the side of the nation's founding queen a thousand years ago and died tragically to bring the country stability.

Then he finds a book that purports to be the True History of Una Everlasting, and gets summoned to a secret meeting with the country's minister of war, an evil girlboss who immediately sends him back in time to experience and document Una Everlasting's Last Quest first hand. He gets to write the nationalist myth himself! What fun!

Alas, it turns out that the great knight Una Everlasting is violent, brutal, and extremely burned out about all the people she's killed as part of the bloody process of nation-forging: at this point the citizens think of her as a butcher and she's inclined to agree. Nonetheless, fanboy Owen convinces her to take on this one last quest for the sake of her honor & kingdom & legacy &cetera, with the promise of peace at the end of it, knowing full well that the end of the quest will in fact mean her death.

This is the first section of the book and tbh I enjoyed it enormously. Owen is writing the narrative in first person and his voice is used to great effect: he's a twisted-up and self-contradictory character who shows the problems of nationalism much better as a guy who's genuinely trying to convince himself that he believes in it than he would if he started out already enlightened. I love his embarrassing radical pacifist dad and his judgmental thesis advisor, and, as heterosexualities go, I am absolutely not immune to the allure of large violent depressed woman/weaselly little worm man whom she could easily break in two who is obsessed with her but also fundamentally betraying her. If the book had ended at the end of its first section, I think it would have been a phenomenal standalone novella.

However, the book does keep going. I continued to have a good time, more or less, but the more it went on the more I felt that it had sort of overplayed its hand. Alix Harrow is extremely a Power of Fiction author in ways that didn't fully work for me in the other book of hers I read; I do appreciate that this book is the Power of Fiction [derogatory] but I still think that perhaps she is giving fiction a little too much power ... For the length of ninety pages I was willing to role with the importance of The Great Nationalist Myth, but the longer it went on and the deeper and more recursive it got with its timeloops the more I was like 'wait .... we only have one founding myth? changing the myth really directly and immediately impacts the future in predictable and manipulable ways and is in fact the only thing that does so? Hmm. Well."

Also I enjoyed the evil girlboss right up until it was revealed that every evil girlboss in the country's whole thousand-year-old history had been the very self-same evil girlboss and no other woman had ever done anything. You are telling me you have built up a whole thing about this country's founding myth of the Queen And Her Lady Knight from scratch and that didn't change the country's relationship to gender at all? NO other woman was ever inspired to do anything with that? I am not sure that's as feminist as you think it is ...

Anyway, I do think this book and The Island In the Silver Sea form a sort of spiritual duology and I'm glad to have read them back to back: for such similar books they have really interestingly different flaws and virtues.

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Sat, 07 Feb 2026 06:08:45 GMT

Festivids reveals have SNUCK up on me they are happening TOMORROW and I have NOT had time to watch all the things I wanted to watch but! here are some things I very much liked anyway!

First, my own three (3!!!) beautiful vids:

Sharp Dressed Man, for Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, a glorious celebration of Theatrical Fashion

Touch, for the film Phantom, tense & wistful lesbian tragic romance!

and Ready to Fight, also for Phantom, TRIUMPHANT KINETIC ACTION

I did not expect to receive vids for either of these sources and they are all beautiful and perfect to me!!

And now, an incomplete list of other vids I really really liked and/or was impressed by and/or laughed my ass off at:

who wants to live forever (17776: What Football Will Look Like In The Future)

Congratulations, You Survived Your Suicide (Disco Elysium)

Everything I Need and PC Dyke (Dykes To Watch Out For)

nothing and everything (Hamlet) (the SONG CHOICE)

The Man I Knew (Jesus Christ Superstar)

Here (Labyrinth) (THE SONG CHOICE!!!)

ASSHOLE (Looney Tunes)

Let's Get This Over With (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

Ya Ya (Sinners)

There Is No Ship (Steerswoman)

man (Victor/Victoria)

I hope some of you enjoy some of these as much as I did!

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Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:35:50 GMT

I finished Tasha Suri's The Isle in the Silver Sea yesterday and I am wrestling with profoundly conflicted feelings about it. It's an interesting book, it's an ambitious book; it's a book with a great deal to say, sometimes with a sledgehammer; it went in places I didn't expect, and appreciated, and also I think it maybe fails at the central task it needed to succeed at in order to make it actually work for me as a book.

The premise: we're on an island, and this island is composed of Stories About Britain. London is there, constantly caught between Victorian London and Elizabethan London and Merrie Olde England depending on what sort of narrative you're in. The Glorious Eternal Queen reigns forever with her giant ruffs and bright red hair. Each bit of the island is tied to a bit of story, and that story attaches itself to particular people, Incarnates, who are blessed/cursed to live out the narrative and keep the landscape alive with it. At this point this has been going on for so long that incarnates are usually identified pretty early and brought to live safely at the Queen's court where they kick their heels resignedly waiting for their fate to come upon them.

Sometimes immigrants come to the island. When they come, they forget their language and their own stories in the process. They are not supposed to get caught up in incarnation situations, though -- in theory, that's reserved for True Born Englishmen -- but unfortunately for our heroine Simran, she appears to be an exception and immediately upon sighting the shores of the isle as a child also started seeing the ghost of her past incarnation, indicating that she is the latest round of the tragic tale of the Witch and the Knight, who are doomed to fall in love and then die in a murder-suicide situation For The Realm.

Simran's knight is Vina, the mixed-race daughter of a wealthy noble, who is happy to be a hot and charming lesbian knight-at-arms but does not really want to be the murderous Knight any more than Simran wants to be the Witch. However, the plot begins, Simran is targeted by an Incarnation Murderer who kidnaps her best friend and challenges her to meet him on her Fated Mountain, and they of course have to go on a quest where they of course fall in love despite themselves and also learn more about why the current order must be overthrown because trying to preserve static, perfect versions of old stories is not only dooming a lot of people to extremely depressing fates but also slowly killing the Isle. This quest makes up the first part of the book.

I am very interested in the conversation that Tasha Suri is using this book to have about national narratives and national identities and the various stories, both old and new, that they attempt to simplify and erase. Her points, as I said, aren't subtle, but given Our Current Landscape there is a fair argument to be made that this is not the time for subtlety. I also think there's also some really good and sharp jokes and commentary about the National Narratives of Britain, specifically (evil ever-ruling Gloriana is SUCH a funny choice and the way this ends up being a mirror image for Arthuriana I think is quite fun as well).

On the other hand, the conversation is so big and the Themes so Thematic that they do end up entirely overshadowing the characters for me, which I do think is also a thematic failure. The first part of the book is about Vina and Simran's struggle to interact with each other and their lives as individuals, rather than the archetypes that overshadow them, but as Vina and Simran they also never quite felt like they transcended their own archetypes of Cranky Immigrant Witch and Charming Lesbian Knight With A Hero Complex. Which startled me, tbh, because I've liked several of Tasha Suri's previous books quite a lot and this hasn't struck me as a problem before. But I think here it's really highlighted for me by the struggle with Fate; I kept, perhaps unfairly, compare-contrasting with Princess Tutu, a work I love that's also about fighting with narrative archetypes, and how extremely specific Duck and Fakir and Rue feel as characters. I finished part one feeling like I still had no idea whether Vina and Simran had fallen in love as Fated Entities or as human beings distinct from their fate, and I think given the book this is it really needs to commit hard on that score one way or another.

Part two, I think, is much more interesting than part one, and changes up the status quo in unexpected ways. If I pretend that part one landed for me then I'm much happier to roll with the ride on part two, though there is an instance of Gay Found Family Syndrome that I found really funny; you can fix any concerning man with a sweet trans husband and a cottage and a baby! genarti will argue with me that she thinks it was more complicated than that, to which I will argue, I think it could have been more complicated IF part two had had room to breathe and lean into any of those complexities. Making part one half its length and part two double its length would I think fix several of my problems with the book. "but you just said that Vina and Simran don't feel specific enough" yes that's true AND they take three hundred pages to do it! I'd be less annoyed about them feeling kind of flat if we were moving on more quickly to other things ...

Anyway. I didn't find this book satisfying but I did find it interesting; others may find it to be both. Curious to talk about it with anyone else who's read it!

Sidenote: the Tales and Incarnations are maintained by archivists, who keep the island and the stories it contains static and weed out any narratives they think don't belong. This of course is evil. I went and complained about the evil archivist propaganda to genarti, who read this book first, and she said 'read further.' So I did! It turns out that in contrast to the evil archivists, the woods are populated by good and righteous librarians!! who secretly collect oral histories and discarded tales that have been deemed subversive by the archivists but which of course the island needs to thrive. I do appreciate that not all institutional memory workers are Evil in this book and I understand the need in fiction to have a clear and easy distinguishing term between your good guys and your bad guys, but Tasha Suri, may I politely protest that this is in fact also archivist work --

Sidenote two: v. interesting to me that of the two big high-profile recent Arthurianas I've read the thing I've found most interesting about both of them is their use of the Questing Beast. we simply love a beast!!

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Tue, 27 Jan 2026 04:23:17 GMT

Like several other people on my reading list, including osprey_archer (post here) and troisoiseaux (post here, I was compelled by the premise of I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World After 28 Years In A Convent, a once-bestselling (but now long out-of-print) memoir by a British woman who entered a cloister in 1914, lived ten years as a nun, decided it wasn't for her, lived another almost twenty years as a nun out of stubbornness, and exited in 1941, having missed quite a lot of sociological developments in the interim! including talking films! and underwire bras! and not one, but two World Wars!

Obviously Baldwin did not know that WWI was about to happen right as she went into a convent, but she does explain that she came out in the middle of WWII more or less on purpose, out of an idea that it would be easier to slide herself back into things when everything was chaotic and unprecedented anyway than to try to establish a life for herself as The Weird Ex Nun in more normal times. Unclear how well this strategy paid off for her, but you can't say she didn't give it an effort. Baldwin was raised extremely upper-class -- she was related to former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, among others -- but exited the convent pretty much penniless, so while she did have a safety net in terms of various sets of variously judgmental relations who were willing to put her up, she spends a lot of the book valiantly attempting to take her place among the workers of the world. And these are real labor jobs, too -- 'ex-nun' is not a resume booster, and most of the things she felt actually qualified to do for a living based on her convent experience (librarianship, scholarship, etc) required some form of degree, so much of the work she does in this book are things like being a land girl, or working in a canteen. She doesn't enjoy these jobs, and she rarely does them long, but you have to respect her for giving it the old college try, especially when she's constantly in a state of profound and sustained culture shock.

Overall, Baldwin does not enjoy the changes to the world since she left it. She does not enjoy having gone in a beautiful young girl with her life ahead of her, and come out a middle-aged woman who's missed all the milestones that everyone around her takes for granted. She does, however, profoundly enjoy her freedom, and soon begins to cherish an all-consuming dream of purchasing a Small House of her Very Own where she can do whatever the hell she wants whenever the hell she wants. After decades in a convent, you can hardly blame her for this. On the other hand -- fascinatingly, to me -- it's very clear that Baldwin still somewhat idealizes convent life, despite the fact that it obviously made her deeply miserable. She has long conversations with her judgmental relatives, and long conversations with us, the reader, in which she tries to convince them/us of the real virtues of the cloister; of the spiritual value of deep, deliberate, constant self-sacrifice and self-abegnation; of the fact that it's important, vital and necessary that some people close themselves away from work in the world to focus on the exclusive pursuit of God. It is good that people do this, it's spiritual and heroic, it's simply -- unfortunately -- the only case in which she's ever known the church to be wrong in assessing who does or does not have a genuine vocation after the novice period -- not for her.

Baldwin is a fascinating and contradictory person and I enjoyed spending time with her quite a bit. I suspect she wouldn't much enjoy spending time with me; she will keep going to London and observing neutrally that it seems the streets are much more full of Jews than they were before she went into the convent, faint shudder implied. At another point she confesses that although she'd left the convent with 'definite socialist tendencies,' actually working among the working people has changed her mind for the worse: 'the people' now impressed me as full of class prejudice and an almost vindictive envy-hatred-malice fixation towards anyone who was richer, cleverer, or in any way superior to themselves. Still, despite her preoccupations and prejudices, her voice is interesting, and deeply eccentric, and IMO she's worth getting to know. This is a woman, an ex-nun, who takes Le Morte D'Arthur as her beacon of hope and guide to life. Le Morte! You really can't agree with it, but how can you not be compelled?

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