Ruth Sadelle Alderson

My Habits As A Super-Reader

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:38:04 GMT

My mom sent me a link to this LitHub article about "so-called super-readers." (That "so-called" is total nonsense because the only one calling people that is the author.) Her definition of super-readers is people who read at least a hundred books a year. I've read at least a hundred books each of all but one of the last seven years, so I guess I meet her criteria. She interviewed some super-readers and identified five trends (sort of - another structural weakness of the article is that she has five trends, but then includes multiple things under some of them), which I thought would be interesting to compare to my reading habits.

"1. They Worked Their Way Up to Super-Reader Status"

I've always loved to read, so this seems wrong, but my book reading did skyrocket in 2020. Looking at my book list posts, I did also read over a hundred books in 2002. I would say that one of the big things that has affected how many books I read each year is how much fan fiction I read. It's not that I wasn't constantly reading in those years I didn't read more than a hundred books; I was just reading different things. In the 25 years of my annual book posts, the lowest number of books I read was 31 in 2010, and it's no coincidence that approximately 7% of the words of fic I have posted on AO3 are from that year.

"2. They Have a Wide Range of Interests"

I would not have said this is true of me, because I do think I stick within a few discrete genres of fiction, but then I started thinking about what those genres are, and it's a lot of them, so I guess I read fiction relatively widely. I do not read nonfiction widely, however. One other piece she throws in here, even though it seems like its own thing, is that most of the people she talked to will DNF (did not finish) a book that they're not enjoying. That I definitely do, and depending on the book and how much I'm not enjoying it - and whether or not it's for a book club - determines how long I'm willing to give a book before abandoning it.

"3. They Optimize for Access, Not Aesthetics"

This is about how super-readers don't care about book format, which, obviously? If the point is to read a lot, then it doesn't really matter what format it's in. This is also where she talks about how libraries are essential and that people "juggl[e] multiple library cards from different systems." That is me! I have cards from two different public library systems, plus access to ebooks from two more through one of them, plus a University library through work. (In California, public libraries that receive state funding, which is most of them, have to give a card to any California resident who wants one, although they can make you apply in person.) The thing in this one that most resonated with me is that the important thing is having the next book ready. I pretty much always know what I'm reading next.

"4. They Read in the Margins of Life"

This is about how super-readers read in little bits and pieces all the time. I only sort of do this. I can't read just one chapter before bed (unless it's a book club book I'm not really enjoying) because if I get into it, I will want to keep reading and then stay up too late. I usually read for most if not all of the day on Saturdays, and I usually read at least one book most Saturdays. I do make sure I have a book on my phone if I'm going somewhere where I'll be waiting so I can read then. I was consistently reading for about an hour after work most days for a while, but now I'm spending a fair amount of that time on my Hebrew class homework instead.

"5. They Develop Methods for Retention"

This one is about how super-readers who read for pleasure, as opposed to reading for self-improvement, don't worry about remembering all the details, but that they tend to have some system for remembering something about the book. I have been doing short notes about books I read on BlueSky, and while that does help me remember them when I go back to do my annual post about the best books I read, the purpose was actually to recommend books to other people. (And I don't know if I'm going to keep that up.) Remembering details isn't really important; the point is to enjoy the book in the moment.

"The Common Thread"

Her conclusion is about how super-readers just keep reading. She says, "it can be liberating to see what happens when reading becomes less about mastery and more about momentum—not as an exercise in discipline, but one of sustained pleasure." This is another one that makes me say, yeah, obviously? Are there people out there who think recreational reading is about "mastery" and not about enjoying it? I guess I will join her conclusion that being a "super-reader" isn't about some special talent (although my reading speed is pretty fast) and is primarily about reading continuously.

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2026 Goals and Intentions

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 03:00:57 GMT

Who knows what will happen this year. I always hope for a better year. I still like making goals and being able to check in about them regularly to keep track of what I'm doing, so here we go.

Create. I want to keep up my just do a little bit practice of making art. It can sometimes feel a little bit like just ticking a box, but it keeps me in just enough practice that when I do feel like doing more, I can do that easily.

Strengthen connections. I love both doing and keeping track of this, so it continues to stay on the list. This year's specific addition is to remember to stay in regular contact with friends I don't already keep up with regularly.

Connect to God/engage in Jewish practice. I'm keeping this because it's still important to me. At a minimum, I will keep up my weekly Shabbat practice and continue learning to read Hebrew.

Improve/maintain my mental/physical health. The primary priority here is to get back into a regular sleep schedule, and then get back to walking regularly once my ankle has fully healed. I am also going to take time off on a more regular schedule.

Take care of some practical things. This list includes things like buying a new couch, getting my hair cut regularly by someone else, and getting my knives sharpened. I will be making a list to check off as the year progresses.

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2025 Year in Review: Goals and Intentions

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 03:42:32 GMT

I was 45 in the year 45 squared, which should have been good, but, alas, not so much. This was yet another rough year. The first half is kind of a blur, and life stuff ramped up in the second half. I went through several waves of tough work stuff. My mom had a hip replacement, which meant I worried a lot, ran some errands, did some respite caregiving, and made sure I checked in with my parents more frequently than I had been. I broke my ankle, which upended my fall and winter. Plus there was the ambient fascism ramping up. All of that really took up a lot of my time and physical/mental/emotional energy this year. I am very grateful I can afford to just throw money at some of my problems (takeout for dinner once or twice a week, Instacart for groceries and drug store things, ordering books and DVDs I just want online). I also appreciated that my job gives me lots of sick time. I didn't use that much of it due to the workload increase with the work stuff, but it was good to have it there for when I needed to go do stuff for my mom and my upcoming PT appointments for rehabbing my ankle.

Even in bad years, there are good things. My sci fi book club continued on for a second year, and that also meant I got to have monthly Zoom catch-ups with lakeeffectgirl after the book discussion. I started having semi-regular Zoom catch-ups with a friend who used to come to town regularly but doesn't now that his parents have moved away, and did one with another friend who lives far away. I continued to chat with another longtime friend on the phone at least a few times a month. My family had lunch every month, including one where we went to visit my brother (he lives about two hours away now) instead of him coming here. I had some regular TV show or movie hangouts with one pair of local friends at their house, and semi-regular bad movie nights with another local friend at my house. I took a couple of classes on things related to Judaism, including the first of a three-semester series on prayerbook and Torah Hebrew. I read a lot of books, including an enjoyable stint rereading some books I loved as a teenager. I had a relatively brief but highly enjoyable period of being solidly into a fandom (cut short not for any fandom reasons but by the real life stuff from above taking over my life). I made a couple of new recipes that were amazing. I took a restful trip to the beach and stayed in a beautiful place.

Create. I wrote at least a tiny bit and did at least a tiny drawing pretty much every day except on Shabbat.

Make a new dinner recipe at least once a month. I made six new recipes, and five of them turned out good. Two of them were things I made again multiple times.

Strengthen connections. You may notice that almost all of the highlights from my year above are these kinds of things.

Connect to God/engage in Jewish practice. It doesn't feel like I did a lot of this, but I did go to (virtual) services every Friday night, and on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and starting to learn Hebrew has been very fulfilling.

Improve/maintain my mental/physical health. I asked my doctor to increase my meds dose early this year, which helped a lot. I struggled most of the year with a regular sleep schedule to a degree I didn't realize until I was looking back at my weekly check-ins. I was finally starting to do better on going walking every day, and then I broke my ankle.

Care less about work. I had a couple of small stretches of doing much better about this, but it was a tough year for it.

Engage my brain. Eh. My Hebrew class was good for this, as was the fannish stretch, but I can see in my weekly check-ins where this completely fell off a cliff, and it was really just life stuff all happening and taking over.

Buy a new couch and new lamps. I did some shopping at the beginning of the year and didn't find what I wanted. Then, just as I was ready to take up the project again, I broke my ankle and that upended the rest of my year.

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The best books I read in 2025

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 01:18:18 GMT

I read 110 books in 2025, which averages out to just a fraction more than two per week. If you want more, shorter recs, I kept up an ongoing Bluesky thread where I recced things as I read them. My impression of this year was that I stopped reading romance novels and started reading thrillers instead, but when I looked at my list, I did still read a bunch of romance novels, but most of them weren't good. I've provided content notes where I remember them; as always, feel free to comment or message/email me if you want more information.

Top 13 fiction books/series I read in 2025

The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson was absolutely engrossing. I enjoyed the combination of supernatural horror, women's rage, and horse culture. Content notes: ritual murder, terrible men, grief/mourning, all kinds of pregnancy things, mysterious supernatural being.

Third Time Lucky by Aurora Crane is a completely delightful m/m grumpy cop whose previous partners both cheated on him/sunshine military pilot who's always been straight before romance novel. There's food and bed sharing and a very close relationship before they have sex.

The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan is an engrossing and queer novel about an author and the history behind her, her pseudonym, and the things she's running from. I recommend it! It pairs well with Once More from the Top, below.

Of Time and Of Seasons and A Striving After Wind by Norma Johnston are a YA duology about a large, artistic family in New Jersey in the first year of the Civil War. I have no idea if they're good if you didn't read them when you were a child. I did, and I loved revisiting them. I find them fairly fluffy if melodramatic at times, but a bunch of content notes: offscreen rape of a character with diminished mental capacity due to a childhood traumatic brain injury, offscreen other attempted sexual assault, judgy Christian community, more God than I remembered in the second one, extreme lack of thought about enslaved people.

Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer is a delightful, fun book about a teenager on a seastead in a near-ish future world. She has adventures and bargains with people and saves the day. My sci fi book club all enjoyed it and would read more about the character and the world. It was originally separate stories that have been spliced together, and there are a few details that didn't quite get smoothed out in the editing process.

Prince and Assassin by Tavia Lark is a genuinely good m/m fantasy romance. An assassin is sent to infiltrate the prince's household and assassinate him, but they fall in love instead. Plus, there are magical giant cats. It's a good time! Content notes: blood magic coercion, past murder.

Once More from the Top by Emily Layden is an excellent book about a Taylor Swift-ish singer-songwriter. The inciting incident is that her teenage best friend's body is found in a lake 15 years after she disappeared, and the story gives us the story of what happened then and the music career interwoven. I lived deep in the world of the book the whole time I was reading it. It was in the suspense/thriller category in the library catalog, but it isn't really that kind of book. There is a mystery, but that's not what it's about, and Layden does a great job weaving it all together.

A Killing Cold by Kate Alice Marshall is an excellent protagonist with an unremembered past, her fiance's super-rich family, and just the family and three servants at a mountain retreat thriller. I fully stayed up too late reading it and there were elements that were vivid enough that they kept popping into my head later. Content notes: genre-typical violence, past child danger.

The September House by Carissa Orlando is an excellent haunted house horror novel. It starts out very funny - Margaret is not leaving her house just because the walls bleed and the ghosts become active in September - but gets darker as it goes along, both as the supernatural elements intensify and as we learn more about Margaret's past. Content notes: domestic violence, murder, supernatural evil.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi is so fun! It's funny and not too realistic and my sci fi book club and I enjoyed it a lot. There are cats who are spies, unionizing cetaceans, and jokes about Spotify's level of evil. Be sure to read the bonus story at the end, which is also very funny.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh is so good! The main character is the head of the magic department at a boarding school, so there's great world building and dealing with the everyday work of a school. I found it delightful. Also, funny and queer. It's British, and I'm sure there are some jokes and references I didn't quite get because I'm not intimately familiar with the British school system. Content notes: demons, past death, teenagers in danger.

Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera is a really good a podcaster stirring up an unsolved case where the main suspect, who is the protagonist of the book, doesn't remember what happened novel. I liked that it was also funny. First line: "A podcaster has decided to ruin my life, so I'm buying a chicken." Content notes: murder, terrible men.

This Girl's a Killer by Emma C. Wells is an enjoyable thriller about a woman serial killer who kills terrible men. I read a handful of thrillers about women killing terrible men this year, and this is the one I liked the best. It could have used a smidgen more copyediting, but I read the whole thing in one day. Content notes: murder, terrible men.

Top 5 books I read and then thought about a lot in 2025

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks was one of my choices for my general interest book club this year. As a group, we mostly liked the historical parts and had some quibbles with the framing device. I enjoyed reading it but had a lot of questions about what it had to say. One of the stated values of the book is that it took a mixing of cultures to make the book the book is about (the Sarajevo Haggadah); then the historical parts are all dramatic (we never saw people just using the Haggadah) and variations on the Jewish experience of we thought we were safe and then they tried to kills us. I thought about that a lot. Content notes: varying kinds of historical antisemitism/wars/violence.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys had really interesting worldbuilding, but the pacing was a little off and I didn't love the ending. I also found it super interesting that she didn't explain any of the Jewish elements - just assumed you would get it. I thought a lot about the worldbuilding element of watersheds as the base unit of political entities.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll is one of those books I found it hard to leave. It's a very good, feminist, queer, intense story about women in the 70s in the path of a serial killer. I also ended up thinking about it a lot more after I read This Book Will Bury Me, below. Content notes: terrible men, difficult families, period-typical bigotry.

The Widow on Dwyer Court by Lisa Kusel is a page-turner that needed more setup for the ending, but it's one where I thought about it a lot because of my complaint about the basic premise of the book. The protagonist Kate is an asexual (she learns the term "sex averse" partway through the book) erotic romance writer married to a very sexual man who travels for work. Their deal is that he can have one-night stands while traveling, but then has to come back and tell her all about it for her to use in her books (sometimes she gives him assignments). That would be fine, except that she can't write sex scenes without hearing about his experiences and using them. It would be one thing if the book was like, this is how this one person does things, but the book's position is that an asexual person couldn't possibly write sex scenes just from their own imagination. That's not how that works??? I promptly thought of at least four tweets/Tumblr posts about asexuals writing sex scenes to counter that. Boo, terrible representation, did she do any research beyond googling for baseline definitions of sex averse versus sex repulsed?

This Book Will Bury Me by Ashley Winstead is a thriller about true crime internet sleuths investigating murders told from the point of view of one of the sleuths setting the record straight about what happened. I don't know how much I liked it, but it was a page turner, and I kept thinking about it mostly because it made me think about and contrast it to Bright Young Women. Content notes: grief/mourning, murder, danger.

The author whose entire oeuvre I read in 2025

I read or reread all of Natasha Pulley's books this year. I started with The Mars House, which I loved and which my sci fi book club read at the beginning of the year. It has sci fi, climate change, immigration, a ballet dancer, queer romance, arranged marriage, linguistics jokes/references approved by a linguist friend, a character learning how to be part of a powerful family, plus mammoths, all as a very good story.

Then I reread The Watchmaker of Filigree Street so I could read the sequel, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, which I hadn't read before, and I loved both of them so much. Everything I want to yell about is a spoiler, so I'll just say, AAAAAAAHHHHH, FEELINGS!!!!

I next reread The Bedlam Stacks. I didn't have quite as many feelings and it's a little slower, but still good. It's more of an adventure. Everything I remembered about it came from the last 25% or so of the book.

I hadn't read The Half Life of Valery K before because I thought a book set in the Soviet Union in the Cold War might be too grim. It was pretty grim (and with an only partly happy ending), but also completely engrossing. I could not put it down and I wasn't ready to leave it at the end. It's probably the most haunting of her books. It requires all kinds of content notes: Soviet state violence, deliberate murder, human experimentation, radiation poisoning and its effects on everything from the landscape to children.

Then I reread The Kingdoms, which is still very good. I remembered the happy ending and forgot how rough (emotionally for characters, not the writing) the middle is. But aaaahhhh, the happy ending! I have a lot of feelings about it. Content notes: death/disappearance of people in different timelines, war-related violence, off-screen/past sexual coercion.

Finally, I read The Hymn to Dionysus, which I had to wait to read until it was actually released. It's so good. Gods, politics, queer romance. It was adorable and intense and I love how much the main character loves babies. Content notes: suicidal ideation, PTSD, death.

Here is my definitive which is best for which situation ranking: The Mars House is the most straightforwardly enjoyable. I have the most feelings about The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. The Half Life of Valery K is the most intense. The Bedlam Stacks feels the shortest and is also the most point A to point B to point C storytelling. The Kingdoms is the one that reads most like a mystery. The Hymn to Dionysus is the most magical. Anyway, if any of them sound good to you, I highly recommend her work. The other thing I will say about her books is that reading a bunch of them all at once made me see how much she writes variations on the same relationship dynamic. If you read one of hers and dislike the dynamic, you might not like the others.

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Virtual Trick-or-Treating

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:02:28 GMT

Happy Halloween! Welcome to the seventeenth annual edition of virtual trick-or-treating.

Usually for virtual trick-or-treating, you get to knock or ring the bell by leaving a comment and I will give you a treat just for you. However, yesterday I fell on my morning walk by catching the edge of the asphalt on part of the street that doesn't have sidewalks and fractured a bone in my ankle. I'm in a boot and can move around, it was my left foot so I can still drive, and I had already planned to take today off so I don't have to go to work today, but I also don't feel up to doing a bunch of specific treats. So instead we're doing a virtual version of what I'm doing with candy at home. I'm leaving a handful of treats in the comments and you can enjoy whichever one(s) you want.

(Not my actual door. Photo by Flickr user pixle, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

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The White Lotus Seasons 1-3

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 03:11:05 GMT

This started with lakeeffectgirl asking if she should watch The Pitt or The White Lotus next. I offered to watch one of them with her, so we're now watching The Pitt together at a slower pace, but in the meantime, I binged all three seasons of The White Lotus in approximately a week. I'm not sure I liked it, but it is extremely watchable. Then I made the perennial mistake of reading Tumblr posts in the tag (instead of curated by people I trust) and now I have some things to say about it. I'm trying to just throw things out there instead of writing a full essay-style post so I can actually finish this, so if you don't know anything about the show, this probably won't make sense.

( Spoilers )

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2025 Goals and Intentions

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 18:28:01 GMT

This is another year where I have no idea what will happen. I still like making goals and being able to check in about them regularly to keep track of what I'm doing, so here we go.

Create. I want to keep up my just do a little bit practice of making art, because it does help, and it doesn't have to be a lot.

Make a new dinner recipe at least once a month. I have been bored with how I've been eating and I read a bunch of recipes, so it's time to get back to cooking occasionally.

Strengthen connections. I love both doing and keeping track of this, so it continues to stay on the list.

Connect to God/engage in Jewish practice. I'm keeping this because it's still important to me. At a minimum, I will keep up my weekly Shabbat practice. I also want to continue learning to read Hebrew, and I'm now on the mailing list for a place that offers classes I can take online from a queer-friendly place.

Improve/maintain my mental/physical health. If I can just get back to my usual schedule of going to bed on time, getting up on time, and going walking, then that will do a lot for this.

Care less about work. I will do good work while I'm at work, but I don't need to keep thinking about it when I'm not there.

Engage my brain. Some of the things that worked well for me in 2024 were things that engaged my intellectual brain: taking a class, reading some very good and thoughtful sci fi, writing some media criticism. It's better for me to work on this than to just watch mindless TV all evening.

Buy a new couch and new lamps. I have needed a new couch for years and need replacement lamps. I did not do much about a couch last year, but this year is the year.

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2024 Year in Review: Goals and Intentions

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 04:16:07 GMT

Oh, goodie, another hard year. Having my major dental surgery at the end of 2023 knocked me out of my routine, including changing how I ate for months, and it's only now in the last week of 2024 that I feel like I'm getting back to normal. There was some hard stuff at work this year. The state of the world is, you know, how it is. I wear a mask in stores and am frequently the only one doing so, which hurts my heart and my deep sense of justice and care for other people. I did a lot of zoning out on TV and Tumblr posts instead of doing things that would be better for me.

While they feel like they were drowned out by all the bad things, there were some really great things about this year. I started a new book club to replace the one that ended in 2023, and sometimes we talk about books and sometimes I just spend an hour on Zoom chit-chatting with the one or two people who are there. My other book club continued to meet regularly, and a person who had dropped out came back and told us lots of fun stories about her kids. I had regular masked matinees (watching a TV show or movie while all three of us are masked) with my friends who have long COVID and aren't up for much else. Regular family lunches were a delight. My brother graduated (again) and it's a real joy for all of us that he got into first the grad school and then the specific lab he wanted to work in, especially because he's close enough to come up for the day for holidays. I watched a TV show and emailed about it with my bff and we and another friend did a couple of Discord movie watchalongs I got to spend a very enjoyable afternoon with my childhood best friend and her family and had breakfast with her that same weekend. The friend I watch bad movies with and I got together as often as we could around her cycle of toddler in daycare sickness, and she said she really appreciated that I kept reaching out to her. I went to the beach and replaced worn out clothing and bought a piece of art in a charity auction. I found a second congregation whose livestreamed services I enjoy. I got deeply into a couple of TV shows and wrote some fic.

Create. I kept up my weekly journaling practice most weeks, did some drawing, did some fic writing, wrote some Dreamwidth posts, and did some baking. After the election, I saw a Tumblr post from someone who says that aside from their anarchism, they recommend making something, that they forced themselves to create the day after other hard things and it helped. With one exception, I have written at least one sentence and drawn at least one tiny sketch every day since then, and it does help. I also got very excited about making vegan buttercream frosting this fall.

Get absorbed in stories. I did this! I watched a lot of TV shows, including all eight seasons of House, which is an old-school show with mostly 20+ episodes per season. I read some books I got deeply involved in. I got absorbed in some fic.

Bring new things into my life. I didn't do so great with this. I don't know how I would do this, and I didn't really seek out new things.

Strengthen connections. Nearly everything I can think of as highlights from my year were connecting with other people. I will continue to do this.

Connect to God/engage in Jewish practice. This was hard! I kept up my Shabbat practice, took a class, and went to a Jewish art making workshop. But I don't set time aside for this, especially when I'm not taking a class, and I don't have a community for it.

Improve/maintain my mental/physical health. This did not go well at all. I've been using my end of year time off to try to get myself back into a regular schedule so I can get back into this.

Go to the beach. I did this! It was amazing. I did nothing and learned nothing. I walked or sat on the beach, took a couple of scenic drives, ate delicious food, and stayed in a beautiful room in a beautiful place. It was a good practice in just being present. I will be doing this again.

Buy a new couch. Alas! This did not go well. I went to one place earlier in the year, and to three places at the end of the year. I still need a new couch, so this goes back on the list.

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The best books I read in 2024

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 01:13:06 GMT

I read 104 books in 2024, which averages out to two per week. If you want more, shorter recs, I kept up an ongoing Twitter thread, which then moved to Bluesky, where I recced things as I read them. I've provided content notes where I remember them; as always, feel free to comment or message/email me if you want more information.

Top 12 fiction books/series I read in 2024

The Future by Naomi Alderman - The ideas she was playing with were fun, the storytelling was great, parts of it were funny, and I enjoyed the ways it was Jewish. She doesn't contend with fascism or Christian nationalism, which does impede the realism. It kind of made me want to reread The Power to compare it to this one - I think they both have a similarly simplistic view of humanity but opposite conclusions.

Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau - This was a book club book, and we all enjoyed it. It's a fun, short read that's a coming of age set in 1975 when a 14-year-old is a summer nanny. It seems like the kind of book where things could go very wrong, which I especially expected because of the other book by her I read, but they don't.

Watch Us Shine by Marisa de los Santos - This is the most recent book in her series about Cornelia Brown and her family, and it's absolutely lovely. Marisa de los Santos was a poet before she became a novelist, and her use of language is incredible. The story made me feel so many things. Content notes: child abuse, substance abuse, a cult, gun violence, most of it as stories people tell about the past.

With My Little Eye by Joshilyn Jackson - This is a solid, compelling thriller with great character work. There was one plot thread I didn't pick up on but could see the clues to once it became clear. Content notes: stalking, past sexual assault, murder, teenagers in danger, some villain pov.

The Space Between Worlds and Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson - I reread The Space Between Worlds so I could read Those Beyond the Wall while the previous book was fresh in my mind. They're excellent and intense and queer, and I had a lot of feelings. They're not exact analogs, but there was something about Those Beyond the Wall in particular that made me think K. M. Szpara is an if you you like, you'll like for these books. Content notes: lots of violence and death.

A Shot in the Dark by Victoria Lee - This was a very good queer m/f romance (he's trans, she's bi/pan) that's also about art and difficult families and Judaism. I both laughed and cried. The author calls it a "rom angst." Content notes: addiction, grief/mourning/death, past child abuse.

The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Manschild - This was funny with really good writing, and it's very Jewish. There's a chapter narrated by a bodega cat, and it ended on an idea that's extra interesting because I read it in two different books this year. Content notes: antisemitism, golem/genre-typical violence.

What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall - I thought this would be a basic thriller, but it was darker and more haunting than I expected, and very well written. Content notes: genre-typical violence, past sexual assault, small-town secrets.

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz - The worldbuilding was interesting, the conclusion was interesting, and I love iterative time travel changes things stories. It was darker than I anticipated and may not be what you want to read in the current political climate. Content notes: murder, abuse, all varieties of sexism and misogyny.

Outlawed by Anna North - This was right up my alley. It's an alternate history western with interesting religious stuff, reproductive rights, a whole group of queer/trans people, heist planning, a life vocation, and a cult of personality. Content notes: the horrors of forced-birth culture.

The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer - This is a lovely book that has a children's book series, a romance, chosen parent/child relationships, and a happy ending. Content notes: grief/mourning, past child neglect.

The Hurricane Blonde by Halley Sutton - This is a Hollywood/LA noir novel, but modern-day and feminist. I stayed up too late reading it because I absolutely could not put it down. Content notes: substance abuse, murder, past sexual assault of teenage girls, terrible men and the people who cover up for them.

Top 4 romance novel books/series I read in 2024

The Leather & Chrome series (Reckless, Temptation, Yearning, Joyful) by Kiki Clark - These are m/m kink romance novels set around a motorcycle club that works with a domestic violence shelter to provide emergency help and intimidation of abusers. The motorcycle club has a pride flag hanging up and everyone is very chill about the kink. Fun! I enjoyed them a lot! But I desperately need Knuckles's book, and it was not the one that she published after I finished the rest of the series and had given up my evil empire mostly questionable ebooks free trial. Content notes: some scenes of violence, some domestic violence, some emotional neglect by a family, daddy kink, age play in one book.

The Brat and the Beast series (Hurt Me, Daddy; Comfort Me, Daddy; Away Games) by Misha Horne - This is a m/m daddy/brat high school (but they were both held back so they're 19) series that is unrealistic and probably unhealthy in real life but very emotionally satisfying. Like all of Misha Horne's books, it's very heavy on spanking kink. Content notes: child abuse and neglect, poverty, food insecurity, substance abuse (not by one of the main characters), past bullying.

Luke and Billy Finally Get A Clue by Cat Sebastian - This was the first book I read in 2024, and it's a cute, fast read. It's a m/m novella about baseball players in 1953 who are in love but haven't admitted it to each other yet ending up alone together in a house during a storm. Content notes: head injury, orphanage past.

The Theriot Family series (Remington, Corbin, Lancelot, Dax, Ambrose) by Silvia Violet - This is a five-book kinky m/m mafia series. Yes, it's nonsense that two sets of male cousins would all be into both men and kink, but the books are enjoyable. They have just the right level of plot and they daisy chain together well. Content notes: mob violence of all sorts. I have no idea if the author actually knows anything about New Orleans and the bayou, so there might be location issues I didn't recognize.

Top 4 books I read and then thought about a lot in 2024

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver - This was way more compelling than it seemed like it would be. I read it for book club, and we all enjoyed it. I thought about it a lot because I have some questions about how it landed 25 years ago compared to how it does now. Content notes: colonialism, poverty, child death.

Prom Mom by Laura Lippman - This book made much more sense once I read the author's note at the end. It was interesting and Lippman's writing is always good, but (a) it was too deeply a realistic early COVID days novel to be comfortable reading and (b) there's no way to foresee the ending because so much of what leads up to it takes place off the page. I did keep thinking about pieces of it and her note about what she's trying to do with her recent work. Content notes: COVID pandemic, murder, terrible men, infidelity.

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai - This is a compelling novel about a woman who went to a boarding school re-examining both her time there and a murder. There's a repeated motif of a litany of crimes against women without identifying details that was both effective and (deliberately) upsetting. I appreciated that the time she's looking back on to look at the changing norms is the time I was also in high school. I thought a lot about those litanies of crimes. Content notes: discussions of all kinds of sexism and violence against women, including against teenage girls.

The Lady Upstairs by Halley Sutton - This was an interesting book with secrets, a mystery, and a toxic relationship. The answer to one of the central mysteries is obvious to the reader fairly early, but it was compelling to watch what the main character does without figuring it out. Content note: con artists, murder.

The 1 book that most annoyed me into frequently thinking about it in 2024

Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology by Jenni Quilter - This was a book club book, and while we talked about it a lot, none of us liked it. One of my central problems with the book is that she gives lip service to queer and trans people developing alternative family and kinship structures, but she never applies that to her own life/family. Quilter is bi, which is why it was so surprising to me that even by the end of the book, it's clear that her idea of a family is still a cis man and a cis woman who are, or have been, in a romantic relationship and their biological child. She and her co-parent were already exes when they decided to have a child, and she still seems so reluctant to allow anyone else (the boyfriend she meets after she has a kid, the woman her co-parent meets and marries after their kid is born) to have the title of parent. Halfway through the first chapter, I thought, "Is she a TERF?" and then got to a note about queer and trans people existing and that much of the research/history is about cishet people. After finishing the book, I was still asking, "But is she a TERF?"

I was also skeptical about her grasp on history and science. There's a part where she talks about how the combination of the average lifespan and average number of children each woman gave birth to in colonial New England means that women spent half their lives pregnant. But that's not how historical average lifespan data works; the high levels of infant and child mortality bring the averages down. I spent some time googling and found data showing that the life expectancy of women who survived to adulthood was early sixties, which means that it would have been less than half of their lives that they were pregnant. Knowing that she was wrong about that made me less willing to trust the rest of her work.

Anyway, the book is neither bad enough nor popular enough for Maintenance Phase or If Books Could Kill, but I crave a Michael Hobbes looked up all the sources and read several extra books podcast analysis of it.

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Virtual Trick-or-Treating

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 01:50:28 GMT

Happy Halloween! Welcome to the sixteenth annual edition of virtual trick-or-treating.

Knock or ring the bell by leaving me a comment, and I'll reply with a treat of some sort. It might be a fic snippet, a picture, a song, or something else I come up with in the moment. Lurkers and anonymous trick-or-treaters are welcome! (But if you're posting anonymously or with a DW account that is completely friends-locked and you want a treat specific to your interests, let me know something about why you know me.)

(Not my actual door. My actual door got painted this year, which is why we have now switched from red doors to green. Photo by Flickr user benefit of hindsight, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.)

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Dear Yuletide Author (2024)

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 19:58:41 GMT

Hi! I'm excited you're writing me a story! Thank you for taking on one of these requests.

First up, what I do and don't like in fic. I'm cool with gen or pairing fic, sex or no sex. I've tried to give you a variety of ideas for each fandom if you want somewhere to start from, but please feel free to go somewhere else with your story if there's something else you want to write. I want this to be fun for you!

Likes: Clothes sharing, d/s, women, relationships between equals, people being smart/competent, people acting like adults, cuddling, happy endings, kids and babies, dialogue, slowly developing relationships, relationship negotiations of all kinds, kink negotiation, unconventional parenting arrangements, people making reproductive choices (no matter what the outcome), non-creepy possessiveness, nonsexual intimacy (sex is also good), power dynamics, feminist themes, hand-holding, food sharing.

Dislikes: Embarrassment (especially teenage embarrassment), misogyny, an overabundance of teenage angst, stories designed to make the reader feel anxious or full of dread (I like things that are prickly and difficult, just not in a doom is coming or embarrassment sort of way), graphic on-screen violence (the aftermath of violence is fine).

Now on to specific fandoms:

( Home Again (2017) )

( If Books Could Kill (Podcast) )

( Quest For A Maid - Frances Mary Hendry )

I hope that gives you some good ideas to start from, and I hope you have a good Yuletide experience! ♥

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Eddie Diaz and Masculinity

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 21:33:31 GMT

I have watched all seven seasons of 9-1-1, and now I can speak much more authoritatively about the connection (or not) between the actual show and the way the fandom talks/writes about the show. Last time, I had a lot to say about Buck, and I stand by all of that. Having watched the show, I now understand why everyone in the LA of the show adores Eddie. (I can't stop thinking about a Tumblr post that referred to him as something like "LA's specialest boy.")

Eddie, Masculinity, and Parenting
There's a lot in the show and the fandom about what a good father Eddie is. And he is! One of my favorite Tumblr posts on the subject I've seen is a side-by-side of Eddie taking his father to task for his bad parenting and Eddie doing the complete opposite of each of those things with Christopher. With the exception of telling Chris they're together and going to be okay when I think Chris just needed to know it was okay to be sad about his mom's death, I think he genuinely does a good job as a parent. He clearly adores his kid, he does his best to reach the appropriate balance between protecting Chris and letting him have his independence, and he really lets Chris have and express his emotions without trying to stifle him.

And I think he's a good father to a son, but I'm not sure he would be as good a parent to a daughter. The first place I started to really notice this is in "Eddie Begins" (3x15), where we see him at Christopher's birth. He is clearly overjoyed when he says, "We have a son," to Shannon. One of the things Eddie talks about his dad doing is telling him when he was 10 that it was time for him to be a man around the house, and he is clearly trying so hard not to teach his son the same stifling lessons about masculinity that he learned - see also the time he tells Frank, the only therapist in the show's LA, that he doesn't want Christopher to be like him - but it's still very tied up in masculinity. Eddie isn't parenting a child; he's parenting a son. I think the show also emphasizes this every time Eddie calls him "son" in direct address, which I expect they chose to do because they were translating "mijo" to English. I don't know enough about Spanish-speaking culture(s) to know if "mijo" has the same connotations, but to me "son" really emphasizes the gender, not just the relationship.

Eddie and Relationships; or, He's Not Gay, He's Just Sexist
Now that I have watched the show itself, I'm even more baffled by the fandom's strong, strong fanon that Eddie is gay. He is not. He is absolutely delighted to hook up with Shannon when they reunite. He gets flustered the moment he meets Ana because she's pretty. He's so pleased to see Marisol when they run into each other again at the hardware store. He canonically has the kind of sex with women that ends up with them the wrong way around on the bed (we see him that way with both Shannon and Marisol).

The show itself finally says in season 6 that Eddie doesn't know how to date because he's never really done it before, which I think is an important note about his romantic relationships. The only relationship he had before we met him was with Shannon, who he describes as the first girl he ever loved. They met when they were teenagers and got married right out of high school. (More or less; the show's timelines do not make any logical sense.) Eddie tells Bobby that he loved being married to Shannon, which is an interesting comment to make considering how much of their marriage they spent apart. I think part of what he needs to come to terms with is the fact that Shannon's death means he will never have a chance to be a good husband to her.

One of the ways we see Eddie grow over the series is that we see him learn to be emotionally intimate relationships, and one of the most fascinating things about it is that he only has those relationships with other men: Buck, Bobby, Frank, and his dad. There is so much fic where he hangs out with some combination of Maddie, Linda, and Karen that I was genuinely surprised by how little he ever talks to them or to other women. So much of the fic dealing with his parents is about his mom, and yet the emotional journey on the show is about his relationship with his dad. The times we do see him open up to women, he's not doing it to be open with them, he's doing it to help them, like his conversation with May or the time he talks a woman on a call through an exercise he tells her helped him when he had panic attacks. I'm guessing fandom puts the women into these stories because they want someone like them to have a place in Eddie's life in some way and/or because they think he's gay and being gay makes him like a woman, but that doesn't reflect the reality of the character.

I do think Eddie gets better. Fandom is pretty dismissive of Eddie's ability to have a relationship because he asks Marisol to move out just after she moves in, but I actually loved that conversation and thought it was very emotionally mature. Eddie is admitting he needs some time to process and Marisol is admitting she kept the fact she almost became a nun from him on purpose. They're open with each other, and they're both happy about her moving out and taking a step back.

But he doesn't have close women friends. And while the writers might not have done that on purpose (the show is so unserious that I don't know that I trust them to have done anything interesting on purpose), I do think it's part of the same masculinity, and its attendant sexism, he learned from his dad and is trying not to pass on to Chris.

It's very interesting to me that the fandom thinks he's gay, and yet doesn't seem to acknowledge the way his life is so full of men.

Old Fangirl Continues To Yell At Cloud
I find all of this so frustrating because there are some super interesting things here! You could look at Eddie's combination of being pretty, tendency toward emotional repression, love of drama, catty remarks, and emotionally intimate relationships with men and think that that's an interesting way to be a man. Or you could take the sexist and homophobic path and think that only a gay man could be like that.

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Buck, Eddie, and 9-1-1 Fandom's Relationship to Masculinity: An Outsider's Perspective

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 00:51:47 GMT

I have been thinking about this a lot, so this is a handful of semi-thought-out points so I don't have to actually watch the show and write something more put together.

Caveats:

I have not watched the show. I have read a lot of fic, watched some clips on YouTube, and backread a couple of Tumblrs, but not watched the actual show. Probably there are things in here that I would have a different opinion about if I did.

I am a #FannishRebel4Life. The phrasing of that is mostly a joke, but I have a long history of being a rebel when it comes to fandom. Sometimes that means I see something and think "obviously A" and then find out that everyone else's perspective on it is "obviously NotA"; sometimes it means that I see everyone approaching something one way and want to do a different thing out of contrariness.

I am absolutely fascinated by 9-1-1 fandom's relationship to masculinity and how unnuanced it seems. I also want to be clear that I don't think anyone is doing this on purpose, but that it's coming out of an interesting cultural context around masculinity and queerness.

Buck's Bisexuality and Straight White Masculinity
I saw a gifset of Oliver Stark talking about how the show has always had queer characters, but people are upset about Buck being queer. Surely someone somewhere in this fandom has written about how that's about masculinity. Masculinity, particularly straight white masculinity, has such a foundation of (a) opposition to femininity and (b) power, specifically power over others, and that includes being the dominant sexual partner. People have spent six seasons getting to know Buck as a big manly man who has sex with hot girls. It's okay that he wears pink and has emotional reactions to things because he's still big and manly. But kissing men and having sex with men is something women do, and that's a real step too far in the mainstream construction of acceptable masculinity. I expect it's made even worse by the fact that Tommy is also a big manly man and he kisses Buck first; not only is Buck having sex with a man, but now they have to contend with the fact that maybe he's the one sucking cock and getting fucked. For people who have looked at or up to, or identified with, Buck and his masculinity, it's a lot easier to just get mad about it than to re-examine their ideas about what it means to be a man.

A Sidenote About Buck and Whiteness
I read a lot of fic before I ever looked up what the characters looked like, and I was very surprised to learn that Buck is extremely not blonde. His hair is barely even lighter than Eddie's. And yet so much fic calls him blonde. I mentioned this on Twitter, and someone said she's seen Black women talking about white people describing people as blonde as being about whiteness, not about actual hair color. So now every time I read someone calling Buck blonde, I both think they don't know what that word means and am acutely aware that what they're really doing, probably unconsciously, is emphasizing that he's white.

The Abundance of "Girl Dad" Fic
I loathe the term "girl dad." It is ridiculously and unnecessarily gendered and reinforces the idea that parents can/should treat their kids differently based on their gender. I am also deeply fascinated by how much of the Buck accidental baby acquisition, Buck and Eddie adopt a child, and even Buck and Tommy adopt a child fic is about Buck having a daughter, much of which is tagged, summarized, or noted with some variation of "girl dad." I expect at least part of this is about defining masculinity by the ways it contrasts and interacts with femininity. Buck is still a big manly man, so it's okay when he's super sweet to a little girl. And there's probably some wish fulfillment from women whose dads were not that kind of sweet and gentle with them, or whose partners aren't that way with their children. But, again, this isn't really taking a nuanced look at masculinity. It's okay because they're girls, but where is the fic about Buck being that kind of gentle and adoring about a little boy? I'm pretty sure them parenting a(nother) boy isn't interesting to people the way the contrast of their masculinity with the femininity of a little girl is because it's still very much about the acceptable bounds of masculinity.

Eddie's Sexuality
I am so deeply fascinated by how much people have decided that Eddie is gay. I mean, not that he couldn't be, but that they don't think bisexual is even a possibility. From the outside, I have a lot of questions about how much that's supported by the text. I really wonder how much of it is a combination of him being pretty with a tendency toward emotional repression and catty remarks, combined with his failed relationships with women, and that's not a collection of traits we accept in straight men. But we're talking about a guy with PTSD and Catholic guilt who is single parenting a special needs child, and who married the first girl he fell in love with, was separated from her for years, then they reconnected, then she told him she wanted a divorce, and then she died. I just don't think homosexuality is the only possible explanation for his relationship issues.

I know there might have been more character development this season that I haven't watched clips of, but I have real issues with the way fic deals with Eddie's feelings for Shannon. I've read a lot of it about how they never really loved each other and it never could have worked and it was always a mistake. Which, okay, maybe it never would have worked out. But it seemed very clear to me from the clips I watched that Eddie's perspective was very much that he truly loved her. When fandom dismisses that, it doesn't seem like they're respecting or representing who the character actually is. Maybe it wouldn't have worked out, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a deeply important relationship to him. Part of why I'm so sensitive to this because I've been in fandom for 25+ years, and I'm very, very familiar with fandom's "ew, a woman is in the way of our ship" brand of misogyny. To be fair to this fandom, (a) when they hate a character, they do tag the fic "[character name] bashing" so it's easy to avoid, and (b) I've run into a handful of things tagged "Tommy bashing," so they're not confining it to hating women who are in the way of their ship.

Conclusion: Old Fangirl Yells At Cloud
I'm not sure I want to watch seven seasons of this show to write fic out of spite (I already watched eight seasons of House so I could more accurately side-eye takes on Tumblr out of spite earlier this year), but if I did, I would definitely be doing something different from what the rest of this fandom seems to be doing. I'm not sure if fandom has really changed or if it's an effect of being An Old now, but it seems like a lot of popular fandoms are getting less connected to the source material and more rigid about gender roles, both of which are disappointing to me.

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Gender Essentialist and Not Queer Enough: Greta Gerwig's Barbie

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 02:29:20 GMT

This entry was originally going to be in two parts, with the second part being a breakdown of my complaints about Jenni Quilter's Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology, which I also found gender essentialist and not queer enough (weirdly, since Quilter herself is queer), but I got my complaints about that out in a combination of phone calls with a friend and the book club discussion about it, which just leaves Barbie.

( Complaints and spoilers. )

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2024 Goals and Intentions

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 19:11:49 GMT

Who knows how this will go. I still like making goals and being able to check in about them regularly to keep track of what I'm doing.

Create. I know I'll be happier if I create stuff regularly, so I'm keeping this intention.

Get absorbed in stories. Some of the real highlights from 2023 were the times I got absorbed in a book or a TV show, so this is a reminder to do more of that in 2024.

Bring new things into my life. I have no idea how to do this, but one of themes I found looking back at my weekly check-ins for 2023 is how sparse my life is. It's time to add some new things.

Strengthen connections. I love both doing and keeping track of this, so it continues to stay on the list.

Connect to God/engage in Jewish practice. At a minimum, I will keep up my weekly Shabbat practice. I also want to continue learning to read Hebrew.

Improve/maintain my mental/physical health. I think maybe I will shift my bedtime earlier year-round and see if that helps.

Go to the beach. It has been so long since I was last at a beach! I can afford the time off and the hotel room. I will do this.

Buy a new couch. I have needed a new couch for years, and the logistics of couch shopping in a pandemic have stymied me. Even if it takes me all year going couch shopping one place at a time, I will buy a new couch.

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2023 Year in Review: Goals and Intentions

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 19:00:58 GMT

2023 was a really hard year. I had a midlife crisis about fandom. An institutional unwillingness to stand up for and support queer people filled me with rage and heartbreak and caused me to leave an organization I've belonged to off and on for most of my life. I had major dental surgery (the first part of replacing my front four bottom teeth with implants) that took up a lot of my energy for several weeks and kicked off dental work that won't be fully done for months. One of my book clubs ended. I continued to feel really lonely in some very specific ways. I'm still extremely cautious about COVID so I don't really go places or do things. The world is, you know, the way it is.

There were also some good things about this year: I had some really great afternoons with my family. My roof got replaced. I got my own Costco card. I got to hold a baby and be the bedtime story guest reader and a toddler sat on my lap for a bit. I continued to be very good at my job, where I got more responsibility, a significant raise, and my own office. I talked to one of my oldest friends on the phone at least once a week. My BFF and I watched TV shows together and emailed back and forth about it. I read some amazing books and watched some really excellent TV shows. I ate an orange while thinking about liberation on Passover and now I love oranges and have opinions about the best varieties.

Create. Oof. I did not do a lot of this. I did at least some journaling all but one week, did a little bit of fic writing, did some small bits of drawing, and did a little bit of baking. It was a hard year! I didn't have much creative energy.

Strengthen connections. This is still one of my favorite things to fill out in my weekly check-ins. I saw my family every month, talked to a friend on the phone every week, hung out with my local friends, and went to book club meetings. I forgot that I had a specific goal to get better at texting with people. I did a little bit of texting with a few people, but didn't really figure out how to feel comfortable over text.

Connect to God/engage in Jewish practice. I kept up my weekly Shabbat practice. I also took two classes. The most exciting one was Alef-Bet Basics through SVARA, which is a yeshiva specifically by and for queer and trans people. I didn't know until I was in it just how much it would mean to me to be in a queer Jewish space.

Improve/maintain my mental/physical health. This did not go well! I stayed up too late a lot and didn't go walking that frequently and had a depressive episode and a midlife crisis. I can always try again.

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The best books I read in 2023

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 21:02:23 GMT

I read 85 books in 2023, which is about two-thirds as many as I read last year. If you want more, shorter recs, I kept up an ongoing Twitter thread where I recced things as I read them. I've provided content notes where I remember them; as always, feel free to comment or message/email me if you want more information.

Top 11 fiction books/series I read in 2023

Major Bhaajan series (Undercity, The Bronze Skies, The Vanished Seas, The Jigsaw Assassin) by Catherine Asaro - This is a very fun sci fi in space series about a woman who was in the army but is now a PI who also leads her looked down upon people. It's a spinoff from the Saga of the Skolian Empire, but you don't have to read that (or remember anything about it if you have read any of it) for this to make sense. Also, you can skim a lot of the technobabble. My mom also read them and was irked by the gender politics of the world; they make more sense if you know that they're part of the established Skolian Empire, which Asaro started publishing in the mid-90s. Content notes: genre typical violence, somewhat of a military is good vibe.

Before She Finds Me by Heather Chavez - This is a really good thriller with alternating points of view between a pregnant assassin with a moral code whose husband took a job without telling her and a woman whose daughter was shot (but not fatally). Content notes: gun violence, murder.

Alias Emma by Ava Glass - This is a very well done action thriller about a spy taking an asset across London in one day - without getting caught on any of London's cameras. It would make an excellent movie.

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin - This is the sequel to The City We Became, which was one of my best books of 2020. Jemisin originally intended this to be a trilogy but made it a duology instead, so you no longer need to wait to read the whole story. I loved everything, but also cared absolute most about the Manny/Neek romance. Content notes: eldritch horror, real-world racism and injustice.

Wild Massive by Scotto Moore - This book is ultimately a little forgettable, but it is also a super fun read. If you have watched or know about any long-running sci fi/fantasy TV series (Supernatural fans, I'm looking at you), you will probably enjoy the meta of it all. This was a sci fi book club choice, and people's responses ranged widely from loved it to couldn't finish it and included everything in between.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley - This is a very enjoyable book that plays with alternate history and time travel and is also queer. I loved it and when I was thinking about what I read this year that was definitely going on my list, this was one I immediately thought of. It also helped me develop my theory that "genre bending" in the description of a book actually means "this is a very specific type of story, but telling you the specific kind is a spoiler." Content notes: death/disappearance of people in different timelines, war-related violence, off-screen/past sexual coercion

When the Sparrow Falls by Neil Sharpson - This is more or less a thriller, and also funny. It's set in a future repressive anti-AI state in an otherwise benevolent AI-governed world, and has one of the funniest navigating bureaucracy scenes I've ever read. Content notes: repressive state violence.

Lay Your Body Down by Amy Suiter Clark - The book cover calls this "a novel of suspense," which I disagree with. This is a solid mystery in a small town with a megachurch and a former member of the church both investigating and confronting her own past. Content notes: all kinds of harm to women and girls in that kind of environment

First, Become Ashes by K.M. Szpara - This is a completely compelling queer story. The worldbuilding and the place of kink within it are much better done than in his first book, which I read two years ago and still occasionally think about. I loved the ambiguity about whether or not the magic was real. Content notes: cults and all kinds of physical and sexual abuse, including rape. It also has some Harry Potter references, which made me twitch. Szpara is trans and in the acknowledgements, he talks about fandoms, not necessarily creators/original stories: "To Drarry but not to JKR."

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - I loved this book. This is another one that immediately came to mind when I was thinking about this list. I thought Tesh did such a good job of putting the reader in the character's worldview, the worldbuilding was interesting, and parts of it were funny even inside a serious story. The rest of my sci fi book club disliked both the main character and everything else I liked and thought worked well, so it may or may not be your thing. Content notes: all kinds of fascism related horrors

This Might Hurt by Stephanie Wrobel - This was a completely engrossing story. It did a good job building the characters and their stories, and I did not see the ending coming (in a good way). Content notes: a cult, self-harm as performance art, death.

Top 5 books/series I read and then thought about a lot in 2023

Godshot by Chelsea Bieker - This was so well-written, and I got completely absorbed in it. It is also about the sexual assault and forced pregnancy of young teenage girls (the protagonist is 14) in a cult in a drought in central California, and I kept thinking about it after I read it.

Adrift by Lisa Brideau - This is a thriller involving amnesia set in a climate change-devastated near future. It starts out a little slow, but I kept thinking about it after I read it and I enjoyed the building a new life aspect of the story. Content notes: climate change, storms, genre-typical danger.

Constance by Matthew FitzSimmons - A big part of why I kept thinking about this is that I had a lot of complaints about it that I was prepared to share at book club, and then everyone else liked it. The plot had potential, but what I found most annoying about it was that the author seemed to smugly think his ideas were new and revolutionary, which they are not.

Captive Prince trilogy (Captive Prince, Prince's Gambit, and Kings Rising) by C. S. Pacat - This was on my best books of 2021 list. This year, I watched all of Black Sails and wanted to read some other twisty plotting, and ended up rereading this whole trilogy twice. I still love it, and reading it closely twice means I started to see that some elements of both the worldbuilding and writing style start to fall apart if you think about it too hard. Content notes: Ancient Greece-style slavery, consent issues, war-related violence, explicit sex scenes.

Cover Story by Susan Rigetti - This is an Anna Delvey-inspired story that's built around diary entries, emails, etc. I don't know how much I enjoyed reading it in the first place, but the final reveal at the end recontextualized the parts I thought were boring enough to skim and made me keep thinking about it.

Top 2 nonfiction books I read in 2023

"You Just Need to Lose Weight" and 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon - I sat down on a Saturday morning planning to read just the beginning of this and finished the whole book by lunch. I found it much more accessible than her first book, while still being grounded in facts and pointed toward justice. I highly recommend it if you have any interest in social justice and/or the science behind weight. I do have two criticisms: 1. There's a heavy reliance on the implicit bias tests, which in my understanding are not fully scientifically validated as useful. 2. The last chapter is dedicated to pointing out all the other kinds of discrimination that are alive and well in our world today, which is great! Except she leaves out antisemitism, which seemed like a bad thing to leave out.

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan - I was glad I bought a copy of this instead of trying to get it from a library. It's very good and also very intense, so I needed time to recover between chapters and it took me almost four months to read. I greatly appreciated her voice as a fan of TV wrestling with some of the same issues I've been working through, and her turns from thoroughly reported facts to conversational opinions. I do think she lets Damon Lindelof off too easily - sure, he says the right things now, but has he changed his behavior? Content notes: All kinds of interpersonal, institutional, and systemic injustices, harms, and crimes.

The authors I read the most in 2023

There wasn't anyone whose books I read in large amounts this year. I read four or six books by a few people, and they're worth mentioning because they're representative of the kind of easy reads I read a lot of this year.

Jessie Mihalik - I read a total of six of her books in two trilogies. They're sci fi romances with political intrigue and space adventures. I liked the Consortium Rebellion trilogy better than the other one I read. The content notes for these sound very serious, but they're mostly just adventures with space ships. Content notes: genre typical violence, past intimate partner violence, results of nonconsensual human experimentation.

Annabeth Albert - She was one of the authors I read the most in 2021. This year I read the four books in her Hotshots series, which are m/m romances about smoke jumpers in Oregon. I continue to appreciate the diversity of relationship dynamics in her books. One of these deals with disability issues, including sexual functioning after a spinal cord injury, in a way that seemed respectful to me. Content notes: grief/mourning, injury.

A.M. Arthur - I read four of her books this year, and I've read several others before. She writes basic contemporary m/m romances, which is sometimes all I want to read. Content notes: explicit sex, various past traumas.

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Virtual Trick-or-Treating

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 02:19:40 GMT

Happy Halloween! Welcome to the fifteenth annual edition of virtual trick-or-treating.

Knock or ring the bell by leaving me a comment, and I'll reply with a treat of some sort. It might be a fic snippet, a picture, a song, or something else I come up with in the moment. Lurkers and anonymous trick-or-treaters are welcome! (But if you're posting anonymously or with a DW account that is completely friends-locked and you want a treat specific to your interests, let me know something about why you know me.)

(Not my actual door. This year's unintentionally slightly creepy door drawn by me at the last minute because it seemed easier than finding a picture.)

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Overthinking a Hallmark Movie: A Country Wedding

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 22:56:44 GMT

Hoopla has a whole bunch of Hallmark movies and I (a) enjoy basic romances and (b) sometimes want to watch something that takes minimal attention and brain space. Mostly, this is fine. I watch them and move on with my life. But then I watched A Country Wedding (side note: I watched it in part because I like Autumn Reeser, but you could replace her in any scene with Lacey Chabert and no one would notice) and woke up the next morning with a lot of questions, to the point that I would consider writing post-movie fic if I were at all a horse girl.

( Spoilers )

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Things I Watched In March-ish

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 20:21:50 GMT

I originally wrote this post a couple of months ago, but never got around to posting it, so here it is now.

I was still stuck in a "but how do I ethically enjoy things?" spiral, but also I wanted to enjoy things and be entertained, so I watched things, but I definitely felt myself resisting the pull to get sucked in too deeply. I watched a couple of TV shows, but mostly I watched a lot of movies.

( Mum )

( The Menu )

( Name-Brand Hallmark Movies )

( The Buccaneers (1995) )

( Zootopia )

( Den Brother )

( Troop Beverly Hills )

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Black Sails

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 22:08:25 GMT

I watched Black Sails recently, and for the last twelve episodes of the show (out of 38), I just sat and watched without doing anything else because I was so absorbed in it.

( Spoilers, etc. )

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TV show season 3s I disliked: Ted Lasso and Star Trek: Picard

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 02:32:23 GMT

I watched Ted Lasso season 3 a couple of weeks ago, and finished season 3 of Star Trek: Picard this week. I disliked both of them, and then I realized that one of the central things I disliked was the same thing in both of them. ( Minor spoilers. )

Ted Lasso

( Very spoilery complaints. )

Star Trek: Picard

( Spoilery complaints. )

Anyway, I'm three chapters into Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, which is both excellent and stomach-churning, and I do not have positive feelings about people in charge of TV right now.

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Writing update posts hiatus

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 15:52:44 GMT

I've been posting monthly writing update posts for some number of years now. It was partly because it was helpful to me to check in on what I'd been doing and partly because it was a way to post links to what I'd written.

This has been a really hard year for me. My heart has been broken by two different systemic injustices that have left me feeling really untethered (this is not what I thought a midlife crisis was supposed to be like), and I haven't been writing anything. Making posts saying I haven't done any writing is just depressing, so I'm taking a break for now. Past experience suggests I'll get back to writing again someday, and then maybe I'll go back to my update posts.

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April Writing Goals Report/Fic Roundup, May Writing Goals

Sun, 07 May 2023 16:38:32 GMT

Fic Roundup

I did not post any fic in April.

Goals

Report on April:

Write miscellaneous snippets as inspired. - No.

Say positive things on Twitter. - Check!

Goals for May:

Write miscellaneous snippets as inspired.

Say positive things on Twitter.

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March Writing Goals Report/Fic Roundup, April Writing Goals

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 18:20:14 GMT

Fic Roundup

I did not post any fic in March.

Goals

Report on March:

Write miscellaneous snippets as inspired. - Check!

Say positive things on Twitter. - Check!

Goals for April:

Write miscellaneous snippets as inspired.

Say positive things on Twitter.

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