js_thrill | Reading

In 2025 I posted reviews of 44 games, of which 10 were replays, 1 was a revision of an old review, and 33 were games I hadn't played before.

( and here they are )

(I made sure to number them because when I went back to number my book post I realized I had shorted myself four books! It was actually 51!)

My ongoing gaming side-quest is to play games from different countries. This year my new countries were Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Peru, the Philippines, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, and Taiwan, bringing my total to 28. (At least the way I'm counting. I realize that "what is a country?" is a fraught question, but it's also a question that's way above my pay grade so I'm trying not to sweat it for such a low-stakes project.) My list of potential games to play includes 31 more countries. There are still lots and lots that I haven't yet identified a game for, including some seemingly low-hanging fruit, but since I'm keeping it to titles that would be of interest to me outside this project, the search for options can take longer.

My game list is a bit silly right now because I decided to add every game I could remember playing... ever. I love revisiting childhood games, and I enjoy searching for obscure titles and figuring out how to get them to run, so I'm okay with the list just being long. I actually do think it is possible, in principle, for me to review every game I played as a child, while attempting to do the same for books would be totally absurd. I've read a lot more books than I've played games, I started reading at a younger age, and I think I'm much less likely to forget a game than a book simply because I have a strong visual memory. Anyway, for future reference (I know I'll want to know next year) I currently have 280 games on my list.

Of the games I played for the first time in 2025, my favorites include: Until Then, Disco Elysium, Engare, I Did Not Buy This Ticket, The Last Door, and The Drifter.

js_thrill

Today's song is "Running Away With What Freud Said" another track I had not previously heard. It is the first song off of the Mountain Goats' first cassette (confusingly titled "Taboo VI: The Homecoming"). As you can hear, it has that extreme lo-fi sound:

Watch on YouTube

Here is a live version with slightly different lyrics, but which is a bit easier to hear:

Watch on YouTube

It's a short song, with compact lyrics. I like it better than Alphabetizing, because it has more specificity, but the live version is considerably more listenable for me than the boombox quality youtube audio of the cassette tape version (I have my limits for the lo-fi era).

The annotations talk about it being written originally as poetry during the time when Darnielle was working as a nurse at a psychiatric hospital and being tested regularly for drug use by court order. The title and refrain (such as it is) came from a psychiatrist's call in show where the psychiatrist advised someone not to go running away with what Freud said. Most interesting to me from the annotations is Darnielle's final comment:

I wrote this song as a poem, adhering to some principles then very important to me—compress everything as tightly as possible; if there must be images let them speak for themselves; show don't tell, sure but suggest more than you show—and then I set it to simple music using that guitar, probably with the TV still on, which was very much part of the process most of the time in those early days. (365 songs, p. 6)

This passage reminded me of something I think about a lot, which is two versions of the same poem, written by William Carlos Williams. I first encountered them through a post about the power of compressing one's writing as tightly as possible, and it has stuck with me quite a bit). I recommend that whole post, but I will just juxtapose the two versions of William Carlos William's "The Locust Tree In Flower" here:

The Locust Tree In Flower (1933)

Among
the leaves
bright

green
of wrist-thick
tree

and old
stiff broken
branch

ferncool
swaying
loosely strung —

come May
again
white blossom

clusters
hide
to spill

their sweets
almost
unnoticed

down
and quickly
fall

The Locust Tree In Flower (1935)

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

Those familiar with the Mountain Goats will realize that this extreme compression does not always reign over his lyric writing; in fact, he is somewhat famous for often taking an entire paragraph of text and creatively packing it into a single measure of the music; but it is interesting to see the "keep everything concise" phase early on; honing that skill is really good for knowing when to deploy it, and when to unleash the verbosity.

Current Music: Running Away With What Freud Said — The Mountain Goats

js_thrill

Libby is integrated pretty well with kobo (a recent issue with duplicate downloads notwithstanding), which makes the tagging feature in the Libby app quite appealing, because my biggest issue with library checkouts is that sometimes I get a book out and the mood does not strike me to read that book during the window in which I have the book out. This has made me a less avid user of library checkouts than I would like, because I return too many books unread.

ebooks at least are low effort to checkout, and easy to return. But it is exciting for me to be able to mark books as “looked promising, try again later” and also to have the whole array of which books I have checked out browsable via tags.

The biggest downsides are that I can’t link my university library to it, as far as I can tell, and that audiobooks and magazines don’t lend to my kobo for what I assume are very silly rights related reasons. I can borrow them to my phone though, and there is no real situation where I want to audiobook and my kobo would be workable but the phone wouldn’t. The magazines is a drag though!

js_thrill

John Darnielle released a book with lyrics and details about 365 songs (take that leap years!), and I guess we'll see how long I go at reading one of them a day. We will also reveal the narrowness of my Mountain Goats fandom, as I discover many songs I have never before heard, such as the song for January 1st:

Alphabetizing:

Watch on YouTube

Sometimes Mountain Goats song titles are extremely literal, but this song is not about alphabetizing anything. The annotations clarify that the seeds for the song came from what had been a working collection of poems called "Songs from the Alpha Privative" and many of the songs that derive from those poems have "alpha" in the title somewhere as a sort of easter egg. It will be interesting to see if the choice of songs is generally chronological (I did @ Darnielle on bluesky when I had thought about starting this project before the new year, and ask whether you had to read the book in order, and he said there was no particular reason to do so, though).

I am not super surprised I haven't heard this before, knowing that it comes from before Zopilote Machine, but it is very much the sort of lo fi sound that is familiar from the very earliest stuff by them I have heard. I prefer this sound to some of the bigger/fuller things he has been doing on more recent albums (but I also like some of the recent albums quite a bit). I haven't been finding myself drawn to listen to Through this Fire Across from Peter Balkan the way I listened to Bleed Out or Jenny from Thebes, and the last one I had one repeat endlessly was probably Beat the Champ (my entry into Goats fandom was when Transcendental Youth had been released and shortly before Beat the Champ came out, so those two have an unfair advantage, for me).

Current Music: alphabetizing — the mountain goats

mrissa

Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Rereads. I had run out of TBR before Christmas, and it seemed like time. And oh gosh. If you'd asked me the plot of Eight Cousins when I was small--when it was my favorite LMA--I would have said that the plot was "girl has too many relatives, chaos ensues." (This was a form of plot I found very relatable.) But upon rereading, oh my goodness. Oh MY goodness. So there is one aunt who has been giving Rose dozens of "patent medicines" and another aunt who says straight out to her face, "Oh, shut up, Myra, we all know you killed your kid with laudanum," and all the nicer characters are like, "welp, harsh but fair." (This is only barely a paraphrase.) (Also, rather than thinking this was a weird family conversation, I immediately identified which of my great-aunts I thought would be the one to deliver the "you killed your kid" line and went on reading. WELP.) The plot of Eight Cousins is actually "for the love of Pete will you people stop drugging your daughters into immobility." So much wilder reading it that way. The plot of Rose in Bloom has always been "which of my cousins should I marry, obviously not someone unrelated to me, don't be daft." So I always found that one alarming for the same reasons as I found the first one very relatable. I have so many cousins, and I am so glad to be married to zero of them. So at least one of my sets of memories here was intact, but it was the wrong one.

Stephanie Balkwill, The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century. Interesting detail about which women had power, and how they had it, and who was opposed to it, and how it was recorded/discussed after. Filling in a bit of history I didn't know much about.

K.J. Charles, Copper Script. A friend suggested that I might enjoy this one, since I have enjoyed Charles's mysteries and there is a strong mystery/thriller component here as well as a strong historical romance component. Friend was correct, this worked very well for me because I found the romantic obstacles sympathetic and believable and because it stayed reasonably far on the action plot side of the line. Will be poking around to see what else might suit in Charles's back catalog, as one can only expect her to write so many murder mysteries in a year.

Amanda Downum, The Poison Court. Kindle. Fantasy court politics and magical politics entwined, as they must do, with interpersonal politics, lush and engaging, not sure why I thought this was a shorter work than it is but I'm very glad I've gotten to it now.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War. Reread. I had, I repeat, run out of TBR before Christmas, and I noticed that 2019 was a minute ago, so I had not in fact "just read" this one. I reveled in the language and playfulness of it all over again.

Margaret Frazer, Lowly Death and The Death of Kings. Kindle. I'm not finding her short stories particularly transcendent, but they are compulsively and conveniently readable, and I'm out of novels, so. The first is a murder mystery, the second is a political mystery about the death of Richard II, who is the wrong Richard for me to really engage, ah well.

Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists After 1848. Everybody knows I love me some '48ers. This is a study that deliberately looks at different regions of America and genders and classes of German-speaking immigrants rather than treating them as a monolith, so it's full of all sorts of interesting treats of information.

Alice Hunt, Republic: Britain's Revolutionary Decade, 1648-1660. What I really like is that Hunt is really good about questions like "what was going on with the Caribbean colonization at the time" and "okay but what were they writing and doing scientific research about that was not politics." It's about Britain in this decade+, not just about its politics. Really solid stuff, makes me very happy to have.

Tove Jansson, Tales from Moominvalley. Kindle. I'm pretty sure I read this as a child, but I have neither record nor memory of it. It is a delightful gentle fantastical collection, with many of the stories focused on the pleasures of quiet and solitude in a way I find entirely congenial.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel. This was 3/4 of an interesting novel about art restoration, chess, and murder, but then it veered off into mid-late 20th century attitudes about gender and sexuality in ways that I cannot recommend. Go in braced if you go.

Linda Proud, A Tabernacle for the Sun. Kindle. Historical novel in the milieu of Lorenzo de Medici, centering on him but not featuring him as protagonist. This is the first in a trilogy apparently, and if you want to sink into thumping big historical novels, this sure is one. I do sometimes.

Alice Roberts, Tamed: From Wild to Domesticated, the Ten Animals and Plants That Changed Human History. The friend who gave this to me for Christmas opined that it was hard to get more in my wheelhouse than a book that discussed both dogs and apples, and he was correct, and this was fun and interesting and made me happy to read.

C.D. Rose, We Live Here Now. Surreal and sinister and sometimes quite funny, this is a book with a fairly niche audience, and that niche is: have you ever made snarky jokes about Anish Kapoor? To be clear, this book is not about Anish Kapoor. But it's steeped in contemporary art, and that's a pretty good synecdoche for its direction. We make a lot of Anish Kapoor jokes around here. I found this delightful. Installations and disappearances and different angles on similar happenings. (I find it so delightful when I read/listen to interviews with artists from the 1960s who are constantly having happenings! So many happenings! Why can't we have more happenings, I ask you. But this book is significantly more contemporary than that.)

Sean Stewart, Mockingbird. Reread. I had, I am telling you, run out of TBR before Christmas, and I remembered very little of this. It holds up quite well, having really good depictions of family dynamics as well as worldbuilding.

Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. An examination (nonfiction) of what that work actually said and did and also where it ramified in cultures not its own, really interesting storytelling stuff, hurrah, glad to have it on the shelf and think lots of thoughts about exoticization and fantasy.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King. Reread. I had, I hope you understand, run out of TBR before Christmas, and I had not reread this one since high school. I found that while there were a few images I remembered from the last three sections of this omnibus, it was for the most part the first one I remembered. It turns out there's a reason for this. Basically anything where White has to depict a female character is terrible, they're all irrational and yelly and stupid, and it looks to me like he's going "I don't know, I guess people want a one of these? sometimes?" The first section, the best-known section, though: when I first read this when I was 11, I got the vast majority of the funny bits and I did not get the cri de coeur, I did not get that it was someone who had been there for the Great War screaming into the void that another was coming and the alternative was worse. I'm glad to have a renewed sense of it, and also ow, ow, ow.

Robert Wrigley, The True Account of Myself as a Bird. This poetry collection was right on my knife edge between "observes something ordinary in a way that makes it extraordinary" and "plods along in the utterly undistinguished ordinary," with some poems coming down on one side and others on the other.

pauraque

In the absence of either the energy or the photo backlog to do December pictures, here instead is a picture from each of my monthly photo posts from 2025. (Plus one for this month.)

( January-November )

December

view through a window of bare twigs and red berries encased in ice with snowy residential neighborhood beyond

view through a window of bare twigs and red berries encased in ice with snowy residential neighborhood beyond

After the ice storm, the tree out my window was completely encased in ice.

♥

redbird

Steven Spotswood, _Dead in the Frame_ -- the latest Parker and Pentecost mystery, in which the narrator and her boss solve the mystery her boss was being framed for, and another murder that the cops had been ignoring, which turns out to be related. The solution is not at all what I was expecting, on a couple of levels. The book is also about the narrator's friendship with her boss, and the romantic relationship with another woman, which has her navigating various levels of homophobia. (Late 1940s, New York City.)

Malka Older, _The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses_ -- the third of the investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, this one set largely at a university, with academic rivalries and an invention that could threaten various profitable businesses. Still on the implausible, hopefully temporary colony in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

These fit together, which I didn't realize until I sat down to post this.

That makes 39 books for the year, plus short fiction, blog posts, and a few things abandoned partway through.

js_thrill

I suspect I have higher tolerance than most for books with unpleasant protagonists, provided the book recognizes that the protagonist sort of sucks. I have very low tolerance for books where the protagonist sucks and the book thinks the protagonist is A+ super amazing. Those grate on me and I really get very annoyed. But I think even a little acknowledgment that the protagonist has flaws can smooth things for me quite a bit.

Kaaro, the protagonist of Tade Thompson’s Rosewater, is not a particular pleasant or likable person. He has lots of moral failings, from casual sexism to a general lack of interest in others, a frustrating passivity with respect to the morality of how he is using his psychic powers for his main job (government interrogations) and/or freelance jobs (finding lost things, bank security, etc.). He is a bit better morally now than he was as a kid (stealing things he didn’t need just because his psychic powers helped him know where valuables were), but he between his own lack of moral direction and the forces taking advantage of his powers, he is not much improved, and certainly doing more consequential things than stealing a few hundred bucks or some jewelry.

I don’t think we are supposed to see Kaaro as admirable or flawless. I do think we are supposed to find some of his personality charming, which may or may not land, but the most interesting things going on in the story are probably about connection and isolation. Kaaro’s ability is to be connected to other people (via a ubiquitous network of microscopic alien fungus that permits mental and emotional information to be perceived by those who are sensitive like Kaaro). As is often the case with these sorts of stories, we see exploration of identity in relation to how one is delineated from others, how access to someone else’s mind can bring or undermine closeness, how a telepath’s respect for someone’s mental privacy is fundamental to respecting their personhood. While Kaaro is not a great person when it comes to responsible use of telepathy in general, I think the book does a nice job of exploring these familiar themes in an interesting way through this flawed protagonist.

Where the book really stood out for me (and overcame the unnecessary time jumps in narrative presenation) is the alien consciousness and world building for the setting. The Nigeria of 2066 in which the story is set, and the city of Rosewater (which I did enjoy seeing in the different time periods, just maybe not jumping back and forth between them so much), were great! Rich settings! The different forces at work (Wormwood, Section 45, the Political Dissidents, the swaths of people seeking healing), were all great parts of the setting and world!

This is the first Tade Thompson I’ve read; I’ll probably read more.

pauraque

In 2025 I posted reviews of 51 books, of which 8 were re-reads, 5 were revisions of old reviews, and 38 were books I read for the first time this year.

( and here they are )

This brought me up to 11 novels and two short story collections in my chronological Le Guin project. Have I made much of a dent? Well, her website says she produced "23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation" so I have certainly taken a big bite out of the novels even though I'm only up to 1976. I don't think I realized how novel-heavy her early career was. I am not planning to read all the poetry (I'll probably do some) and the only translation I'll be looking at is her Tao Te Ching. And yet, even when I sketch out a planned posting schedule that assumes I'll be grouping some of the picture books together, it still comes out as three more years and I don't know how that's possible. Stay tuned to find out if she really wrote as many things as I think she did, or if I just can't read a calendar.

At the end of last year my TBR list had 180 books on it, and my goal was for that number to go down. Which it did. By three. It's not that I wasn't reading things from the list, it's that I kept adding more. I decided to do a big cull, mostly of books that had been on there for way too long and I couldn't honestly say I was interested anymore. Now it's down to 140.

Of the books I read for the first time this year, my favorites include: The Backyard Bird Chronicles, The Spear Cuts Through Water, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Only Good Indians, and Convenience Store Woman.

lydamorehouse

I really appreciated all the lovely stories that people provided for me yesterday. They really, honestly cheered me up tremendously. THANK YOU ALL SOOOOOOOOOO MUCH.

There were a couple of things going on yesterday, not the least of which was ther prospect of having to work the snow emergency under the new conditions. You all may not be at all surprised to discover that I have "quiet quit," in part because the job became even more unreasonable than it already was.

For those of you just tuning in, the tl;dr is that I previously enjoyed being a "tagger" (the person who gave out parking tickets during a snow emergency) for the City of Saint Paul due to the independent nature of the job. The job changed this year and now the only option is to be an assistant to a retired/reserve police officer as a kind of ride along. Many things, including ACAB, that I no longer could even imagine enjoying, since the largest part of my appreciation of the previous work was, in fact, the autonomy.

Yesterday, things got exponentially worse.

Because I spent much of last season also feeling dread over a job I ended up enjoying, I was determined to attempt to go on at least one shift this year to be absolutely sure that I did, in fact, actually despise it. So, when the call came out yesterday, I BRAVELY answered.

So the initial email offered these shifts, (though they would not guarantee work):

St Paul has DECLARED A SNOW EMERGENCY and runners are needed.
This is a call for ALL Shifts:
- Monday (12/29 NIGHT - 8pm - 5am)
- Tuesday (12/30 DAY - 7am - 5pm)
- Tuesday (12/30 NIGHT - 8pm - 5am)
- Wednesday (12/12 DAY - 7am - 5pm)

Yeah, these are terrible hours. The shift is ten hours, but this was also nothing new. These were the hours I worked last year and I was surprised by how fast the time actually went when you were out and about. So, okay, I wrote back and said I could do the day shift today (you may note I am writing this TODAY.)

The first hassle was waiting to find out if I actually snagged a shift. The email was very clear that I should not show up to work unless I got a notification telling me where and when to show up. Both of these interoggative pronouns confused me a bit since the WHEN was very clearly stated above among my choices and where else would I show up other than the Public Works building in Saint Paul? But, okay, I understood the assignment: wait and see what I was offered before making definite plans to work the next day.

And so I waited.

And waited.

The previous year, this is was much more straight-forward. Regardless of when the text went out (though it was guaranteed to come out by 3 pm the day that the emergency was called), once we agreed to a shift it was ours. You could make plans, pack up a lunch, etc., etc. well in advance.

It was 6:30 pm the night before an early morning shift that I got the following message:

You are scheduled for:
- Tuesday DAY (12/30 - 06:00 - 18:00)

I had to read the message three time before calling Shawn upstairs to also double-check my math. 6 am to 6 pm??? That's a TWELVE hour shift, y'all. Also, NOT AT ALL WHAT WAS INITIALLY OFFERED.

So, with Shawn's seal of approval, I told them absolutely no fucking way. Only, I just used two letters: "n" and "o." And, I was moderately polite about it. I believe my actual response was, "I can not work a twelve hour shift. If that means you need to choose someone else, so be it."

Like, y'all? I was actually perfectly willing to consider ten (possibly horrific) hours in a car with a cop (or, more likely outside in the freezing conditions of the streets of Saint Paul, MInnesota--it is 17 F/-3 C today--with a cop harrassing me to hurry up.) But twleve hours feels vaguely unconstitutional, you know? Especially since at the informational meeting I attended regarding the changes in this job, I asked, "So, you're talking a lot about how fast you want to do this job. I'm a woman who is nearly 60 years old. You will make time for me to go to the bathroom, right?" I got a look like, OMG a woman is speaking and an answer that was, and I quote, "This is why we go to the bathroom before our work." To which, I said, "Sir, we are talking about a ten hour shift and a 60 year old bladder." This didn't didn't even get a laugh. They were dead serious that they weren't willing to give me the breaks that are, in fact, guaranteed by Minnesota Labor Law.

So ... (again, possibly not in a surprise to anyone) ACAB and Fuck Saint Paul.

pauraque

After the events of The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, this conclusion to the trilogy expands the perspective on the Earth-Trisolaran conflict beyond our two petty solar systems to a galactic, interdimensional, and finally universal scale. (Yes, this is the sort of book where rather than wondering if your favorite character survives, you wonder instead if there will be a habitable universe for them to survive in by the last page.)

This book took me a long time to read, not only because it's 600 pages but also because I kept stopping due to real life distractions. I also don't have the book anymore because it had to go back to the library. So I'm afraid this post is going to be more vibes-based than going into a ton of detail, even though seventy million things happened in the book that would each be worthy of detailed discussion.

My ultimate impression of the book (and of the series as a whole) is that there are a lot of things that the author and I will just never see eye-to-eye on, but I don't mind setting that aside because I like the way he explores his ideas even if I disagree with their fundamental basis.

( cut for length )

lydamorehouse

Hey, y'all, I hope you're doing well.

I'm feeling sort of low. Does anyone have a cheerful story to share? If so, I'd love to hear it!

lydamorehouse

Mason bought me a solo RPG called The Bird Oracle for the holidays. I'm several days into it and just wanted to share a bit of my adventure. (Most of this will be under the cut, so those of you who would like to ignore it can.)

Here's a page from my journal:

The Bird Oracle journal sample

Image: sample page of my The Bird Oracle journal, where I've glued in a printed color photo of the nest I built, per instructions.

The basic premise is that I've inherited the cottage of the previous Bird Oracle and the job that comes with it, which is providing divinations for the people who write to me.

Initially, however, Jane (the mentor who left me this cottage) has given me various assignments to ease me into my new role I'm meant to take on. She's teaching me her mystical arts by asking questions I'm answering in my journal (pictured above). Previously, they've been things like what you can see if you expand the picture above where I'm supposed to think about what "egg" might mean to me and respond to a question like, "When do you feel protected?" This is all prep to lead me to coming up with my own definitions for bird-related divination prompts. Sometimes Jane comes with little crafting projects, like above, where I was asked to build a nest for Twigs, the carrier pigeon who also comes with the cottage. (I also later decided there are chickens, but I'll get into that in a second.)

I am not playing as Lyda, however, because, for me, that isn't role-playing. So, I've been feeling around for a character as I've been answering these questions. I finally hit on something as I was writing up my entry for "feather," which turned into an actual story. The only other thing I'll say about this above the cut is that I love playing villains, but RPGs are largely cooperative when played around a table (not all of them, obviously, but player v player isn't much fun when what you're playing is "let's all kill this dragon" or other such things where, you know, it's best if people have the same agenda.) In a solo RPG, I can choose evil.

I'm not choosing to be actively evil in this excerpt, but you can sort of see how it vibes like a villain's origin story (if you choose to read it.)

( Cut for potential boringness.... )

karanguni

In a rather cursed year, Yuletide has been a nice end of season bright spot. I received a delightful Bedlam Stacks fic – The Question of the Chicken and the Egg - that dives into Merrick and Keita's relationship over time. It's perhaps my favourite thing about Bedlam/Watchmaker, and the fic covers some very beautiful moments between these two amoral Company boys.

Some other recs from my limited readthrough:

The Way of the Househusband is striking it out of the park this year, with both delightful loyalty porn ("as you are") alongside :fire: burning hot three-way porn ("I Want to Be With You Night and Day "), with Tatsu watching from the side included :eyes:

Antique Bakery is back in Yuletide, my friends, and this fic serves up Ono and Tachibana off on a trip to Hokkaido ("Obscura")

Wimbledon: Peter is too idiotic to realise his best friend is into him, because of course ("The Best Part of 1996"

Cthulhu Mythos/Dream Cycle: Randolph Carter is going to bring all the horrors to the yard ("Onwards the rite "), and damn right, he's a better dreamer than yours

Then, a now-perennial Yuletide classic, Snake Fight Portion of Your Thesis Defence crossed over with Rivers of London. You know where this one is going, and you know you're going to click on this fic.

landofnowhere

Pride and Prejudice, play adaptation by Sherwood Smith (

sartorias) of the Jane Austen novel. Thank you

sartorias for letting us read your adaptation of P&P originally performed by high school students! It did a really good job of condensing the plot while leaving in some dialogue that adaptations often leave out, and it was funny!

Much Ado About Numbers, Rob Eastaway. I picked this up again and finished it, but found that the bits that I'd already read were the most interesting to me. I found this book to be strongest when it was explaining the technology level of Shakespeare's time, and weakest when it was going into speculative interpretations of Shakespeare. (Though some of the theories it admitted were too far out there, like the joking theory that Cassio the "great arithmetician" might have inspired the naming of the Casio calculator.)

Alice James: Her brothers, her journal, edited by Alice Robeson Burr. I recently learned about Alice James, sister of the better known late 19th century American intellectuals Willam and Henry James, and was interested enough to pick up her diary. This book also contains Alice Robeson Burr's essay on the James family, which had some interesting tidbits that led to my learning more about forgotten 19th century American women intelectuals, like Mary Moody Emerson, aunt of and inspiration to the better-known Ralph Waldo, and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, of which Burr writes "In those days and communities, there was always a woman who read Greek, and in Concord it was Mrs. Ripley who had this distinction."

I'm about halfway through Alice James's diary ; being a diary (and without contextual footnotes) it is slow going although it does have some good passages writing about her chronic illness and other things.

St. Helios, Alice Robeson Burr. The diary being slow going, I decided to look into what else Anna Robeson Burr had published -- she was a prolific popular novelist, and encountered this entertainingly snarky review of her novel St. Helios, which was enough to get me to pick it up. I found it to be very readable but ultimately disappointing novel. It is set in 1920 and centers on the triangle between an aristocratic British poet who is both a relic of the Victorian era and a Byronic figure, his illegimate daughter, and the American lawyer who falls in love with both (though the book is not that slashy). The daughter starts out as the most interesting of the three main characters, but halfway through she gets a change of heart and moves from manipulative schemer to damsel in distress. After reading, I found two more contemporary reviews of this book, which are just as entertaining as the NYT review.

js_thrill

I forgot to finish my retrospective! I’ll do it soon (probably!) (maybe!) (hopefully!)

Instead, I am going to talk about how my kobo has made me better at using the library, because it has good Libby integration, and the primary upshot of this so far has been for me to DNF several books.

Historically, I don’t even start reading library books, really, before they are due back. I just check them out, the spirit fails to move me to start reading them, I read some other book instead, and then return the book unread to the library. (The beginning of If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, where Calvino describes all the piles of books including the ones judging you for not getting around to reading them, really speaks to me!)

Anyway I searched for recommendations of books like Piranesi, or A Deadly Education, or Ancillary Justice, or Tombs of Atuan, or Constellation Games, or The Locked Tomb or Count of Monte Cristo, and got a bunch of recommendations.

So far the best of those was the Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang. A messily plotted novel that works despite a lot of narrative jumping around, partially because the world building is clearly fully developed but not over exposited on the page. I was left wanting more, some threads didn’t go anywhere, or felt like rug pulls, but sometimes a messy interesting thing is better than a neat boring thing. (Usually. Always? Definitely usually.)

The worst, for me, for sure, was The Memory Police, which had a super compelling premise (an authoritarian island culture where the government disappears things physically and from people’s memories). The premise was hampered by completely incoherent logistics/worldbuilding. The narrator, for example, does remember things that have been disappeared, and tells us about them. But the narrator is explicitly not immune to the memory erasing powers of the authorities. So how can the narrator remember birds, the ferry, etc.? Good question! Distracting question! I read some reviews where I learned that the opening scene where the narrator finds out about perfume (which just seems like water to the narrator, having been influenced by the disappearance of the category “prank gifts” I guess?

brainwane

looking forward to the next episode of Pluribus

starting to read the scifi mystery Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

making note of the upcoming Grolier Club exhibition on the mechanization of printing: "The Second Printing Revolution: Invention of Mass Media", starting January 14

thinking about whether I could make some use of the new Rx Inspector tool from Pro Publica

spreading word of the Otherwise Award's year-end fundraising campaign to celebrate scifi/fantasy/genre fiction that expands or explores our notions of gender (I'm on the board)

teaching activists how to use Signal features -- usernames, disappearing messages, nicknames, etc. -- to preserve privacy and improve convenience

listening to episodes of KEXP's Runcast (music) and an Australian guy's One Man, One Hammock (rambling monologues) as I do chores

playing an ad hoc guessing game with my spouse where I look up random records on the Guinness world records website and ask him to guess, e.g., how tall the tallest chocolate fountain is

dithering on whether to write a year-end retrospective for my blog

lydamorehouse

Image: Classice Yule Log with three white candles, bedecked with boughs and ornaments (surrounded by silver reindeer).

HAPPY SOLSTICE to all who celebrate. And those who don't? I hope you had a lovely Sunday all the same.

Our Solstice was much as it is most years--a quiet, family affair. We have some traditions, the first of which is making rosettes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosette_(cookie)). I have attached the Wikipedia article if you have no idea what a rosette is--it is, in fact, a deep fried cookie. Personally, if done well, I think they taste amazing, like sugar and AIR. Because, basically, the batter is ultra, ultra thin and you use a cookie iron to to crisp up a lot of vanilla and sugar-flavored nothing. Our recipe actually comes from a class I took on Christmas cookie making several years ago, but very likely (this being Minnesota) comes by way of Norway, though possibly Sweden or Finland.

The cookie making class is memorable because I was the youngest person in the room. I really figured that probably I'd be the oldest, since I presumed things like rosette, pizelles, krumkaka, etc., were the sorts of things that grandma would pass on and, maybe, it skipped a generation. Nope. It was me an all older ladies and on older guy who kept telling everyone that he took the class hoping to pick up a lady. (Yep, he was that old.) Anyway, me and all the older folks all had a lovely time and I was really only there for the hidden rosette knowledge because everyone agrees there is "a trick to it."

And, there is.

The trick is making sure the irons are hot first--but also not too coated in oil. But that little layer of hot oil will, in fact, help them come off. In fact, ours often just fall off the iron into the bubbling hot oil. So, we always have to have tongs to hand.

Mason and I making rosettes 2025

Image: me patiently waiting for the bubbles to slow down the appropriate amount. Mason in the forground. Our kitchen all around and a few exampes of the cookies drying on the paper towels. The irons come in a lot of shapes--star and flower/rosette shown. Not pictured is the Christmas tree.

We never want the rosette process to be arduous so we only make as many was we feel up to, call it good enough, and then I usually make a fun lunch like deep-fried shrimp. We have charcuterie for our Solstice dinner meal, light our Yule log (pictured above), open presents, and then take a bit of the Yule light upstairs in a safe, insulated container and keep the light burning for the longest night.

I like to joke: if the sun came up on December 22, thank a pagan!

Our Solstice gifts are always books. There is a version of the Icelandic Yule Cat where the present you must recieve is not new clothing, but a book. We decided to adopt that tradition. Mason got a Terry Prachett book (and a gift certificate for Uncle Hugos) because he's been on a Pratchett kick lately; Shawn got the last and final Phil Rickman novel The Echo of Crows; and I got Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Hew Lemmy and Ben Miller. My gift is one I asked for because I've really enjoyed their podcast by the same name.

Also as is traditional, someone's present must include the Solstice wrench. It has been Mason for many years, now, in part, I think because we started using it to baffle a child who could very distinctly tell the shake of LEGOs.

You can keep your King's Cakes, we have the Solstice Wrench!!

By chance our friend John J. sent along a bunch of other book-related presents and so we opened those at Solstice as well.

Shawn inspecting a gift

Image: Shawn inspecting a surprise gift (one of many!) from our friend.

A lovely time all around.

So, again, I hope you all had a lovely Solstice. If not, we can all enjoy the return of longer days. More sunshine! Hooray!

mrissa

Of course I hope you've enjoyed my short fiction and poetry (and nonfiction!) this year. But other people have been absolutely lighting the place up as well, and here are my recommendations for speculative short fiction and poetry for 2025. Even I can't read everything, so please do not take this as a comprehensive list! I'm sure there's great stuff out there I've missed, and if you want to comment with it, that's great. Spread the joy.

Heritage/Speaker | Hablante/Herencia, Angela Acosta (Samovar)

The Witch and the Wyrm, Elizabeth Bear (Reactor)

Thirteen Swords That Made a Prince: Highlights From the Arms & Armory Collection, Sharang Biswas (Strange Horizons)

Biologists say it will take at least a generation for the river to recover (Klamath River Hymn), Leah Bobet (Reckoning)

Watching Migrations, Keyan Bowes (Strange Horizons)

Bestla, James Joseph Brown (Kaleidotrope)

Mail Order Magic, Stephanie Burgis (Sunday Morning Transport)

With Only a Razor Between, Martin Cahill (Reactor)

As Safe As Fear, Beth Cato (Daikajuzine)

And the Planet Loved Him, L. Chan (Clarkesworld)

“To Reap, to Sow,” Lyndsey Croal (Analog Mar/Apr 25)

Atomic, Jennifer Crow (Kaleidotrope)