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I have been taking notes in my sadly decayed handwriting and will try to type and organize them on the train home. I have been very much enjoying the panels even, or perhaps especially, when I want to argue with them.
The train departed 20 minutes late and arrived in Boston 10 minutes early. Why are you capping your speed, Amtrak?! Is it not enough to cruelly deny me actual high-speed rail?
This trip always fills me with nostalgia because I took the same Acela/Northeast Corridor line back and forth to college.
Books finished on the ride up/the night before registration: Susan Casey's The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean (trying too hard for poetry but has 100% convinced me the ocean is Very Cool and We Need to Protect It from Capitalist Exploitation) and Tahsan Mehta's The Liar's Weave (smart and affecting and, though I hate to say it, probably without enough context to do well in the West without some revision; I am glad her breakthrough book here was Mad Sisters of Esi, which I think will do much better, and is also just weirder, wilder, and stronger).
People met up with: kate_nepveu, sparkymonster, skygiants, genarti, rilina, oracne, gwynnega, ninamazing, and probably someone I've forgotten.
Replacement copies of midlist fantasy books of the 80s and 90s acquired: 4
Things I have recommended to con attendees and recommend to you:
- Tanith Lee Humble bundle (26 books for $18!)
- Trung Le Nguyen's live skeeting of Pride and Prejudice, which he has never read before
- Interview with a Vampire/The Vampire Lestat on AMC, which I have been meaning to write up for like three years now

oh hey I'll be at Readercon this year. Let me know if you want to hang out!

Found via

chestnut_pod.

There are so many posts I want to write, but this one is easy and also about books, so! I think everyone should do it so I can spy on your bookshelves.

Take five books off your bookshelf.

(I pulled everything from my physical TBR bookcase, in hopes that it will encourage me to read it.)

Book #1 -- first sentence: "Anyone can write about a large city--large cities are open to everyone--but small cities can only be portrayed by people who love them."

(Already ambiguities: I skipped the preface because this line is better.)

Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty: "However, I haven't yet read V.W.'s book."

Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred: "What amazing childishness these old people were content to live in!"

(Unexpected challenge: do I pick the second sentence or the second complete sentence?)

Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty: "'I know.' Verna dropped the packages. A hard, harsh sob pressed at her throat. 'I hate him.' "

(Yes, I am treating one paragraph of dialog plus action as a single sentence for the purposes of the meme. Fight me!)

Book #5 -- final sentence of the book: "Eunice picked up her bag and guitar and closed the door to the storm."

Make the five sentences into a paragraph:

Anyone can write about a large city--large cities are open to everyone--but small cities can only be portrayed by people who love them. However, I haven't yet read V.W.'s book. What amazing childishness these old people were content to live in! 'I know.' Verna dropped the packages. A hard, harsh sob pressed at her throat. 'I hate him.' Eunice picked up her bag and guitar and closed the door to the storm.

I promise it wouldn't make any more sense if I chose another option for step 5.

Book #1: Friendly City by Sofia Samatar
Book #2: The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, ed. Claire Harman
Book #3: Ready or Not by Mary Stolz
Book #4: The Room Opposite and Other Stories by F.M. Mayor
Book #5: Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale by J.J. Phillips

Chess is a show I know entirely through the cast recordings; if I recall correctly, it was such a thoroughly Cold War project that the liner notes referred to the two chess players as only "the American" and "the Russian". The new book by Danny Strong turns it into a (even more) melodramatic period piece, with the chess matches not simply a allegory for political tensions or a way of obtaining minor diplomatic concessions but tools for averting World War III. The Arbiter, dragooned as a narrator, exposits both the global situation and the personal interactions with the characters, partly through a series of very bad and very obvious jokes.

Freddie Trumper, American grandmaster and obnoxious wunderkind, is challenged by Russian Anatoly Sergievesky, mordant, depressed, and engaged in a clandestine flirtation with Freddie's chess second and lover, Florence Vassy. Freddie is notoriously a weak point in the original book, so prone to anti-Communist slurs, misogyny, and temper tantrums it is impossible to extend him much sympathy. The new version mitigates this by giving him bipolar disorder and medical noncompliance, and also by casting Aaron Tveit. Tveit is indeed so good and so charismatic that I was on Freddie's side way more than I expected, although not enough to take self-pity anthem "Pity the Child" seriously. (The rest of the audience seemed less skeptical.) Lea Michele as Florence is just as strong vocally, and almost as strong in terms of acting, though unfortunately without much romantic chemistry with either partner. (The closest any scene comes to a sexual charge is Freddie's sleazy half-assed attempt at persuading Anatoly to throw the game in Act II.) Nicholas Christopher as Anatoly is the weak point in Act I, where I had the same opinion as I had of his Sweeney Todd: he's got the potential to be great, but he isn't quite there yet. He really needs to work on his emoting, which is too flat even for the murderous Sweeney or the dour Anatoly. He is greatly handicapped in Chess by having to affect a Russian accent, which I really hope the production drops. But! He pulled out all stops in Act II, both for the songs and the acting, and won me over with his intensity and vocal power.

So basically: the book is still flawed and they need to cut the runtime, particularly in Act I. This was the second night of previews, so there's still time for changes before the show technically "opens". If we're lucky, they'll start by cutting the topical jokes.

But the point of Chess has never been the book; it is the score full of bangers and power ballads. The music is by ABBA's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and the lyrics by Ulvaeus and Tim Rice. And the musical performances are GREAT. I am still guiltily fond of the kinda-no-really-very-racist "One Night in Bangkok" (which can plausibly be explained as Freddie's typical white guy take on the city BUT) and which in this production is a camp masterpiece. I am seriously tempted to see the show again just for that.

Sources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves

I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.

Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.

( Cut for length )

Welcome to the Very Slow C.J Cherryh Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.

Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) Since the mid-70s, she has written 77 novels and four short story collections (1); self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.

Notes towards an overview

It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won three Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like many of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think some of it is also due to the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and having to figure out oceanography and navigation pn the fly while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)

Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up hints and asides and put together information by implication, or, if you can't do that, at least to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no comprehension of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.

Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned in a tossed-off subordinate clause in a passage focused on something else entirely, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.

Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)

I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.

Series and other groupings

I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:

The Union-Alliance universe
Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.

In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.

The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)

Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.)

The atevi series
In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.

The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.

The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.

This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.

The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.)

Fantasies
Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).

Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, confused, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably ends up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought.

Shared-world work
The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume: grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.

For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh relied on her college major and Master's degree in Classics to write about Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short stories; some of the short fiction was incorporated into the two novel collaborations with Morris and Cherryh's solo Heroes in Hell novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.

Cherryh launched her own shared world series, Merovingen Nights,with the solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies. She described several of the anthologies as "mosaic novels", and they do indeed show an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the stories penned by different authors. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are very solid.

Full disclosure

This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.

I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.

Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.

I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Hugo Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then-present day, but I think that's it.)

Other Cherryh reading projects

The single tag for Jo Walton's Cherryh rereads has been lost to the Reactor Magazine reorganization, but you can find them pretty easily by going to the oldest Cherryh reviews on the site and reading forward

Ian Sales' SF Mistressworks project has multiple Cherryh reviews by multiple reviewers

The Three Hoarsemen podcast, The Works of C.J. Cherryh

sholio's Read All the Cherryh tag

james_davis_nicoll is reading a Cherryh a month for 2025; to find his earlier Cherryh reviews, use a keyword search

Endnotes

1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]

2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]

Ghost Quartet is a band: Dave Malloy on keyboard, Brent Arnold on cello, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford on various instruments, and everyone providing vocals. Ghost Quartet is a song cycle, a concert album performed semi-staged, a mash-up of "Snow White, Rose Red," The One Thousand and One Nights, the Noh play Matsukaze, "Cruel Sister", "The Fall of the House of Usher", the front page photo of a fatal train accident, and a grab bag of Twilight Zone episodes. The ghost of Thelonious Monk is sometimes invoked, but does not appear; whisky is often invoked, and, if you see the show live, will most certainly appear. "I'm confused/And more than a little frightened," says (one incarnation of) the (more-or-less) protagonist. "It's okay, my dear," her sister/lover/mother/daughter/deuteragonist reassures her, "this is a circular story."

Once upon a time two sisters fell in love with an astronomer who lived in a tree. He seduced Rose, the younger, then stole her work ("for a prestigious astronomy journal"), and then abandoned her for her sister, Pearl. Rose asked a bear to maul the astronomer in revenge, but the bear first demanded a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photograph of a ghost. (The music is a direct quote of the list of spell ingredients from Into the Woods.) Rose searches for all these ingredients through multiple lifetimes; and that's the plot.

Except it is much less comprehensible than that. The songs are nested in each other like Scheherazade's stories; you can follow from one song to the next, but retracing the connections in memory is impossible; this is less a narrative than a maze. Surreal timelines crash together in atonal cacophany; one moment Dave Malloy, or a nameless astronomer played by Dave Malloy, or Dave Malloy playing Dave Malloy is trying to solve epistemology and another moment the entire house of Usher, or all the actors, are telling you about their favorite whiskies. The climax is a subway accident we have glimpsed before, in aftermath, in full, circling around it, a trauma and a terror that cannot be faced directly; the crash is the fall of a house is the failure to act is the failure to look is the failure to look away.

There are two recordings available. Ghost Quartet, recorded in a studio, has cleaner audio, but Live at the McKitterick includes more of the interstitial scenes and feels more like the performance.

In Green-Wood Cemetery, there were three slightly raised stages separated by batches of folding chairs, one for Dave Malloy, one for Brent Arnold, and one for Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, with a flat patch of grass in the center across which they sang to each other, and into which they sometimes moved; you could sit in the chairs, or on cushions in front of the first row, or with cheaper tickets you could sit in the grass on the very low hills above the staging area, among the monuments and gravestones, and, presumably, among more ghosts. The show started a little before sunset; I saw a hawk fly over, and I could hear birds singing along when the humans sang a capella. Green-Wood is in the middle of Brooklyn, so even after dark I couldn't see stars; but fireflies sparked everywhere.

Copied from

skygiants and

qian: a meme that involves book collections and clicking on checkboxes, two of my favorite things.

My Favorite Books (Non-Binding)

ETA: Oh, the profound awkwardness of books which had a huge impact on me but whose authors have since been exposed as abusers. I left them off the list.

ETA2: I forgot so many people
Maybe I really will do another list. Pretty sure I could manage another hundred even with no repeat authors.

ETA3: I am surprised so many people are putting down A Little Princess! It has always been my favorite, but I had the impression The Secret Garden was much more popular.

Another year, another complete failure to write up my reading. I'll try to do favorites later, but in the meantime, have some stats. AMA about the books, or let me know you think about the ones you've also read.

Stats

Books read: 105
TBR (beginning/end of year): 105/99 (-6%)
From TBR: 42 (40%)
Books by POC: 39 (37%)
Books by women: 92 (88%)
Books by T/NB authors: 2 (2%)
Translations: 11 (10%)
New-to-me authors: 28 by 16 authors (15.4%)
Rereads: 39 (37%)

Resolutions: I see that I never wrote up 2023 or resolutions for it. I did privately resolve to read at least one book per month by a Black author, which I did by the average number if not by the calendar month. I had also been hoping to make it my year of James Baldwin, which did not happen at all, but hey, that means I can make that my official book resolution for the year of his hundredth birthday. I am also resolving to read at least one book of nonnarrative nonfiction per month (e.g., history books okay, memoirs not).

Longest in TBR stack: John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion and Other Stories (2004), which I got when it came out. Many books purchased in the last century still languish unread on my shelves, so for 2025 my other book resolution will be to read paper books from my TBR.

Most books by a single author: If I count collaborations as half-points, then it's a tie between C.J. Cherryh and Diana Wynne Jones at 10 each (thank you,

kate_nepveu and

skygiants respectively). If I count collaborations as whole books, CJC edges out DWJ by one. I am not resolving to continue these rereads in 2025 because no resolution is necessary.

Books read

*=reread

John Crowley, Conway Miscellany (Two Talks on Writing, Two Chapters in a Family Chronicle, Sixties Diary, 79 Dreams)
Erin Langston, Forever Your Rogue
Erin Langston, A Day Until Forever
Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend
Kelly Link, The Book of Love
Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gate
Toni Morrison & Rokia Traore, Desdemona
Deborah Biancotti, Waking in Winter
Sherry Thomas, His at Night*
Nghi Vo, The Brides of High Hills
Rachel Neumeier, Marag
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Time of the Cat
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation V4*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation V5*
Barbara Willard, The Lark and the Laurel
Barbara Willard, The Sprig of Broom
Barbara Willard, The Iron Lily
Barbara Willard, A Flight of Swans
Barbara Willard, Harrow and Harvest
Barbara Willard, The Keys of Mantlemass
Helen Oyeyemi, Parasol Against the Axe
Moses Ose Utomi, The Lies of the Ajungo
Moses Ose Utomi, The Truth of the Aleke
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Of Knives and Night-Blooms
John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion
Gillian Bradshaw, The Beacon at Alexandria*
Barbara Willard, The Eldest Son
ONO Fuyumi, Hill of Silver Ruins 2
ONO Fuyumi, Hill of Silver Ruins 3
ONO Fuyumi, Hill of Silver Ruins 4
Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills
Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, the Chain
Vanessa Len, Only a Monster*
Vanessa Len, Never a Hero
Gregory Feeley, Arabian Wine
Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World
Martha Wells, Network Effect*
Martha Wells, System Collapse
CJ Cherryh, Downbelow Station*
CJ Cherryh, Finity's End*
CJ Cherryh & Jane Fancher, Alliance Rising*
CJ Cherryh, Heavy Time*
CJ Cherryh, Hellburner*
CJ Cherryh, Rimrunners*
CJ Cherryh, Tripoint*
CJ Cherryh, Merchanter's Luck*
CJ Cherryh, 40,000 in Gehenna*
Karen Lord, The Blue, Beautiful World
Rebecca Fraimow, Lady Eve's Last Con
Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo*
Rachel Neumeier, Rihasi
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Land Glorious
Tansy Rayner Roberts, This Enchanted Island
Karen Lord, Unraveling
Indra Das, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar
Scarlett Peckham, The Earl I Ruined
Ananda Lima, Craft: Stories I Told the Devil
Alice Bell, Grave Expectations
Alice Bell, Displeasure Island
William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer
Sophia McDougall, Mars Evacuees*
Sophia McDougall, Space Hostages*
Ibtisam Azem, The Book of Disappearance
Alexandra Vasti, In Which Margo Halifax Earns Her Shocking Reputation
Zen Cho, The Friend Zone Experiment
Joan Vinge, Psion*
Sarah Rees Brennan, Long Live Evil
LaToya Jordan, To the Woman in the Pink Hat
Delia Marshall Turner, Nameless Magery
Sofia Samatar, Opacities
Delia Marshall Turner, Of Swords and Spells
Delia Marshall Turner, The Stick Princess
Margaret Kennedy, The Wild Swan
CJ Cherryh, Cuckoo's Egg*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing 4*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing 4*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing 6*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing 7*
MO Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official's Blessing 8*
Laura Kinsale, Midsummer Moon*
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message
CJ Cherryh & Jane Fancher, Alliance Unbound
Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
Kari Sperring, The Book of Gaheris
Nisi Shawl, The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox
Diana Wynne Jones, Eight Days of Luke*
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Season of Dragons
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Siren Boots*
Diana Wynne Jones, Wilkins' Tooth*
Diana Wynne Jones, Power of Three*
Diana Wynne Jones, The Ogre Downstairs*
Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody*
Diana Wynne Jones, Cart & Cwidder*
Diana Wynne Jones, Drowned Ammet*
Diana Wynne Jones, The Spellcoats*
Diana Wynne Jones, The Crown of Dalemark*
Diana Wynne Jones, Charmed Life*
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon
Charlotte Carter, Rhode Island Red
Tasha Suri, The Jasmine Throne*
Tasha Suri, The Oleander Sword*
Tasha Suri, The Lotus Empire
Iona Datt Sharma, Blood Sweat Glitter

Comics, graphic novels, and manga read

KIM Yeon-Joo, Nabi: The Prototype*
KIM Yeon-Joo, Nabi 1*
Tom King & Phil Hester, Gotham City: Year One
John Francis Moore & Stefano Gaudiano, Batman: Family
HINEKURE Wataru & Aruko, My Love Mix-Up! 1
HINEKURE Wataru & Aruko, My Love Mix-Up! 2
KAWAHARA Kazune, High School Debut 1*
KAWAHARA Kazune, High School Debut 2*

It is probably also safe to assume I read a bunch of ongoing series, particularly Kelly Thompson's new Bird of Prey series and DC/Batfamily comics featuring Tim Drake in some capacity, but I am terrible at tracking at individual issues.

Spoilers are falling

Sharon wanted a party, and found a fatal drink; Alice wanted the end of the family curse; Lilia wanted to find joy in her powers and not despair. All the witches who have found the objects of their quests have died, but this is the first episode where the character death really makes sense to me. Sharon was confused and misnamed; Alice was free for the first time in her life; they had more to do. But we get the whole of Lilia's life and the whole of her choices.

Even so, I am not sure this death, or the other deaths, are final. In Tarot, Death isn't death; it's transformation. And witches travel the Road hoping to be transformed.

I didn't realize it was a quake until it was almost over; I thought it was just an unusual amount of construction across the street, or some kind of problem with the elevated train half a block away. Steady rattle/shake, no big sudden shocks. My walls shook, but nothing fell, and there isn't any immediately obvious damage to the building on my floor. It was much less frightening than the 2011 quake, when I was on the 20-somethingth floor above the pit of the Penn Station and I could feel the building *sway*.

My sister, in a basement in NJ, felt nothing; have not heard from my father in Staten Island and assume he slept through it. So far I've heard reports of people noticing the quake as far north as Vermont and as far south as Delaware; no injuries reported yet, and very little verified property damage.

The emergency alert notification didn't hit my phone until 41 minutes after the quake.

I guess two quakes in 15 years means I really should bolt the bookcases to the wall, huh.

Review copy from Netgalley.

There was one cure for grief. You see the body; you mourn.

This is mostly a fairly straightforward retelling of the Christian Incarnation with Jesus as a transgender man, if by "straightforward" you mean almost anything but straight. I had been expecting, I suppose, something more like James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, which combines an agonizing Christ retelling with extreme satire; but there is no satire here, and no winking at the audience.

Maryam, knowing she is pregnant, maneuvers her aristocratic uncle into arranging her marriage to the political dissident Yosef, a sweet-natured and asexual radical; she is open about the nature of her pregnancy but unsurprised when her uncle concludes she is delusional or lying. (Ryman does not leave the reader in any doubt; the novel is clear throughout about the reality of divine intervention in this world. Though "intervention" is too mild a world: Miracles are deformations, not discrete changes but profound and disturbing reorganizations of the entire universe.)

Maryam and Yosef retreat to backwater Nazareth, where Maryam gives birth to a child she assumes is a daughter; the child, from the very beginning, has an adult or even supernatural awareness and understanding of the world. There is a lot about the internecine politics of Roman-occupied Judaea, but very scanty exposition; maybe it makes more sense to Christians, or maybe just to historians of the period.

Yosef preaches the equality of the sexes and the desirability of abstinence (the latter, honestly, is probably much more troubling by the tenets of traditional Judaism); when he and Maryam conceive more children later, it is through primitive artificial insemination rather than intercourse. Maryam, meanwhile, wants a daughter who will give women access to religious participation and all the power and glory that entails; she is infuriated to the point of abuse by the child's insistence that he is male, that he has taken the name of Yehushua after a dead friend, that he will be a carpenter instead of a scholar or preacher. Even once Yosef intervenes to save the child, Maryam struggles against Yehush and dehumanizes him; for decades she thinks of him as "it" rather than "he".

What reconciles them is time and a shared rejection of the earthly concerns of Nazareth social climbers. Maryam and Yehush are indeed alike: passionate, obdurate, and single-minded to the point of tunnel vision. God, Yehush eventually attempts to explain, needs to "learn about pain":

The Son whispered. “I can’t understand it all. But God does not have to do things in order. Here, my dying and its dying with me creates the sympathy. The forgiveness. The understanding that it is horrible to die. And what’s horrible about it is. Is that each time someone dies a part of the universe dies too. And so over time, whole peoples go – their songs, stories, wisdoms.”

“I must die. So that God lives through the death and so changes. And so God will let you all live in the spirit.”

Death is the impetus for change: the original Yehushua's death prompts Yehush to claim his new name and true gender; Yosef's death prompts Yehush to leave Nazareth and become a prophet; Yehush's death prompts God to create souls. It is perhaps inevitable that the book ends in the moment of a pieta, wrought however strange: not Yehush but God Itself seeking a mother's consolation.

coffee & ink

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Quick notes on Readercon

Readercon 35

3W4DW book meme

Chess (Imperial Theater, New York City, 9/17/25)

C.J. Cherryh bibliography

The Very Slow C.J. Cherryh Reread

Ghost Quartet (Green-Wood Cemetery, 6/28/25)

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Books read in 2024

Agatha All Along 1x07: "Death's hand in mine"

Earthquake report

HIM by Geoff Ryman (2023)

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