mozaikmage

All my reads of February and March!

2026-04-09T16:08:57Z

Only read six books each month due to uh. STILL struggling through the Brothers Karamazov lol

Flesh by David Szalay

Started in Jan, finished Feb 1st. Everyone hyping this up was fucking right. Killer last line.

Strange Houses by Uketsu

Worse than Strange Pictures, so probably a good decision to publish that one first in English. I didn’t like how it was all just people explaining things to each other instead of… things happening. But it was still a kind of interesting puzzle thing.

Good Luck, Babe! by Erin Baldwin

The Netgalley arc went kinda viral so I grabbed one. It was okay, but the relationship didn’t work for me: the reason for their rift felt too contrived and poorly resolved.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Read it for friend group book club lol. Also lived up to the hype! I liked reading it. Saved more detailed thoughts for book club.

Heart the Lover by Lily King

I read it half-wondering how it tied into Writers and Lovers and then I got to the reveal and was like Ohhhhhh. Really good, good follow-up/companion/sequel book and good on its own. King is so good at setting up multiple love interests that feel believable as characters the protagonist would be interested in.

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

Short book that took me forever to read, for some reason. I think I found Lazi’s head difficult to inhabit. Interesting, but I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it? The crocodile sections were funny, but the dialogue felt kind of stiff (translation casualty?)

Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood

I checked this out because I wanted to learn what the Ali Hazelwood fuss was about but refused to read reskinned Reylo and you know what maybe I should’ve taken my chances on the Reylo. The narrative voice was actually fine. I thought it’d be cringe/overly twee from what I’ve heard about her writing, but I thought it sounded very standard-issue het romance novel.

But oh my god. It’s an age gap romance where instead of the two central characters having character flaws they develop past over the course of the narrative, the two central characters are just perfect for each other and the only, THE ONLY point of conflict is that one of them is older. Not even that he has different values because he’s older. Age in this book is pretty much literally just a number. All their arguments are just “I’m too old 4 u” “no ur not” and it’s so repetitive and so POINTLESS because the age gap has NO CONSEQUENCES. He’s her older brother’s best friend and the older brother doesn’t even object to the relationship!

I did like the Sicily setting and there’s some fun set pieces and comic misfortunes that occur. The side characters are fine. Honestly even the main characters are fine in isolation, I just feel like the whole concept of an age gap romance was fumbled here. The book probably would’ve been better if they were the same age just because that way the author would’ve had to find a more interesting conflict for them. The rest of it mostly worked though!

Season’s Change by Cait Nary

I really liked this book mostly because it reminded me of Crossfire, my favorite fanfiction, except if Miyuki was more traumatized and Sawamura was into yoga and therapy. I also liked Nary’s writing style, much less detailed than AO3 user Kittebasu’s but still very evocative. I think the author and I might have a mutual acquaintance? There was a familiar name in the acknowledgements section. Pretty good friends-to-lovers hockey romance novel, would recommend!

Us by Sara Soler
This was on hold from the QLL on Libby for at least a year and I don’t think it was worth it. Very “Trans 101”, interesting for the Barcelona-specific angle mostly, but I checked it out because I really liked Soler’s art style in the sample pages and I think she has a good graphic-memoir picture-voice. I would read more memoir from her. I like looking at her pictures. Worth maybe a month or two on Libby hold but not nearly a year of Libby hold lol.

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn

Honestly was not expecting to like this one as much as I did. This is a satire about two Asian American trans girls playing men’s indoor volleyball and being internet influencers, while also being in a relationship with each other and dealing with so many levels of rivalry and jealousy. The no-quotation-marks style really works here, even if it was a little confusing sometimes, because it flattens the social media dialogue, internal dialogue, and spoken dialogue all into one thing, making them all seem equally important. The internet bits felt realistic and believable. It’s trying to do a lot and I think it mostly succeeds. I enjoyed it, actually! Even though there were somehow zero Haikyuu references. Minus half a point for not mentioning Haikyuu</3

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Read this for friend group book club and am thus saving all my best takes for the besties sorry. Reminded me of Sorokin’s work a little, but slightly less gross.

Lucky Bounce by Cait Nary

Finished reading this and then went to Nary’s website to be surprised that this was published after Season’s Change, because it feels like a step down from her earlier book. I liked how colorfully and specifically she described Philly (a town I feel an affinity with because I live near-ish to it lol) but there’s not a whole lot of… plot. I kept waiting for something to happen, like character development for either protagonist, maybe their secret relationship getting discovered or the kid’s mom coming back or something, but nope. Straightforward relationship progression with maybe half a conversation’s worth of friction between sex scenes. It wasn’t an unpleasant reading experience by any means, but it was much less memorable than Season’s Change. The overall story structure reminded me more of fanfiction than anything else I’ve read recently, including the former Reylo BNF.

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Everything I read in January

2026-03-01T02:54:47Z

I read 11 books in January and they were mostly graphic novels and things that came off library hold in this time due to me trying and failing to read The Brothers Karamazov. I have extended my library hold on the Garnett translation Three Times. I’m still less than 50% through. I keep cycling between the translation and the original because the Russian language has evolved less since the 1800s than English has so sometimes Garnett’s Victorian English is harder to read than the original, but then the original has a lot of words I don’t know either (mostly to do with the church stuff). It’s harddddd but I want to stick with it because I’ve already given up on it on two previous attempts and I can’t let my Russian-American complex get to me!

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Hm. I don’t think Murakami is for me. I read Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World when I was in high school and the only thing I remember about that one is his obsession with the girl’s earlobes, so I thought I’d try something else of his and. I just don’t think the lesbian-confession scene was necessary, first of all. It was easy to read though, and compelling even though the main character was annoying.

Solanin and Solanin Epilogue by Inio Asano
I don’t remember what the impetus was for me to read all of Solanin now but I ended up staying up late to finish it in one sitting because Oh My God, Inio Asano is a genius and no WONDER late-2000s webcomics were like this if they were all reading this then. I can see its influence on Scott Pilgrim and Octopus Pie. This might’ve changed my life if I’d read it in high school, it already kinda changed my life now. I want to make something that makes people feel like this. I finished reading it past 1 in the morning and I just wanted to run laps screaming, somehow? Crazy work, Asano-sensei! If I ever meet him I will cry. I knew it was going to be good because of how people talk about it (and because I’ve read other Asano comics), but I didn’t know it was going to be THAT good, even twenty years after it first came out!! Aaaa!!!

Strange Pictures by Uketsu

Gimmicky, but some of the twists did get me, even though most of the mysteries and solutions required me to suspend a lot of disbelief that more than one person in this world would ever think of that. And a quick read! I put a hold on the sequel.

Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by Matt Bell

Got it from the library and liked it enough to consider buying it. Helped me revise my draft. The craft advice was really practical, and the draft ideas were interesting and new to me.

On Her Terms by Amy Spalding

Finally, a genuinely unconventional F/F romance! The lead is in her mid-thirties, bisexual, and just ended her first and only long-term relationship with a man. There’s a stupid fake dating scheme that doesn’t need to happen, a destination wedding to a town an hour away, and a happy ending without marriage and kids, thank god. The lead’s brother and friends were kind of annoying, though. I think I liked the first book in the series better? I skipped the middle book by accident and then refused to check it out even though it’s ready to borrow on Libby because I am still fighting for my life against The Karamazovs.

The Pervert by Remy Boydell, Michelle Perez
I liked it... I liked the art. I remember a lot of people were talking about this book when it was new. I think it still hits now. It would be cool to see Boydell and Perez in conversation with Torrey Peters. I do want to see more of Boydell’s work, the watercolors here are so delicate and evocative... I kinda want to do a watercolor comic...

The Demon of Beausoleil by Mari Costa

Full review here~!

Thirst Trap by Grainne O’Hare

I liked it! Funny, reminded me of Derry Girls because it’s a group of female friends in Northern Ireland. It was funny how one was gay one was bi and one was straight, and they all had relationship problems going on. I enjoyed reading it.

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Dark Academia but with a literary-sounding narrative voice that reminded me of Prep or Elif Batuman’s autofiction. Thoughtful worldbuilding, good sentences. Kind of wish Catherine House was real and I could’ve gone to school there. Pretty good, honestly, but probably would’ve benefited from more literary marketing instead of the dark academia-style cover it’s got going on right now. I was not expecting it to be as good as it was based on that cover, sorry.

I Want To Hold Aono-kun So Badly I Could Die, Volume 13 by Umi Shiina

Got the notification this book was out and dropped everything to read it. One More Volume in English remains... MAN. I have written about Aono-kun previously here. It’s still great! Goddamn!! I love comics!!!

Liquid: A Love Story by Mariam Rahmani

Grabbed this from the new releases table at the library right before The Big Snowstorm in case we lost power and I was bored, lol. Read most of it while snowed in. Sets up a lot of interesting things and then goes with the boring ending... Kind of funny at times, mostly just made me feel bad for the narrator. As always, I liked the diaspora stuff because #relatable. The dude was kind of boring. I think I liked it more than I was bored by it. The jokes helped.

My girlfriend and I have started playing Z. A. T. O//I Love The World and Everything In It and it’s good so far. Namedropped my beloved A Hundred Years Ago Ahead <3. On Ferry’s tumblr she mentioned she was originally inspired by Sorokin’s short story падеж, so I read it and was relieved the final conception of the story changed to not be inspired by that, and then I read another Sorokin short story to confirm that Sorokin is Not My Thing. Very gross, grim, visceral. My mother was right when she said he was мрачный.

Mostly a good reading month, save for my Karamazov struggles. I’ll get to the end of that thing eventually!

Personal Project Update: I am about halfway through my next First Chapter Study, approaching it a little differently than the first two. Hopefully I’ll be done and ready to report on it next week!

Oh also also I wrote a sports anime listicle for The Beat because a managing editor pitched it in the Slack and I was like “this is my pitch, it was made for me.” Read it here.

I finally watched Heated Rivalry (EXTREMELY impressed by Connor Storrie’s accent in Russian, he sounds better than some Russian-American kids I’ve known growing up here!) and I have read some interesting articles that summarize the constant treadmill of fujo discourse Heated Rivalry accidentally pulled forward into the mainstream. This one’s by noted BL Scholar Thomas Baudinette, this one is about queer readings of shonen manga. Interesting stuff!

Thanks for reading!

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Everything I read in December

2026-01-11T03:33:53Z

Last month, I had a lot of time to read books!

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany

I started this in November but finished it on the First. I liked it less than Triton and found it harder to read, but parts of it would’ve made an incredible romantasy premise. Imagine there’s a guy who’s the only survivor of a catastrophe that destroyed his ENTIRE PLANET, and he’s your soulmate, and you’re his soulmate… This could totally work as a romantasy premise. I did enjoy the examinations of culture and imperialism and knowledge as power and gender and labor and all of those things, but it was very dense and kind of difficult to get through.

Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian

Love triangle between a grad student, her thesis advisor, and her thesis advisor’s husband. Could’ve been gayer, but I liked the meta layers of the story.

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 by Adrienne Rich

Well, the title did include the world “difficult,” so perhaps it was on me for expecting to understand these. I ended up skimming some of the poems and then feeling guilty for skimming. Like, they’re poems! It’s not that many words to read! But I don’t think I vibe with Rich’s style. I May Be Stupid.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
Insane how much evil these people got away with. I was excited to read this one because I enjoyed Say Nothing so much, and I enjoyed reading this one too, but also I just felt so… aghast, the whole time I was reading, that all of this was allowed to happen, that the pharmaceuticals industry was so corrupted from every direction, and that every single person involved in engineering the opioid crisis is convinced they did nothing wrong?? I like how PRK structured the book.

Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid

If this was a fanfiction I would have hit the back button about two paragraphs in, but since I checked it out from the library I read the whole thing and was not impressed.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Ashamed to admit this was actually my first Didion and since I was constantly referencing her Wikipedia page/her daughter’s Wikipedia page/googling various namedropped friends and associates, I feel like I probably should’ve started with something else. But this was the only ready to borrow Didion book at my library, so I read it and it was quite sad.

Marriage of a Thousand Lies by SJ Sindu

Reading this book felt like being trapped in a cardboard box. A closeted lesbian married to a gay man has to watch her best friend with benefits also go through an arranged marriage in the Sri Lankan immigrant community in Boston. Bleak and miserable! But good.

Leap by Simina Popescu

Graphic novel about lesbian contemporary dancers in Romania! I enjoyed it.

Workhorse by Caroline Palmer

I think this book was about twice as long and covered about twice as much time as it needed to. The pitch– Devil Wears Prada meets Talented Mr. Ripley – made me expect a lot more Intrigues and Schemes, but the protagonist presents herself as kind of an incompetent alcoholic who occasionally does something horrible for no reason whatsoever. I think she’s supposed to be an unreliable narrator, but her narrative voice is more annoying than fun to follow. The rich people subplot was extremely depressing and kind of undermined the Ripley side of things to me.

Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake

I couldn’t get through a page of The Atlas Six, so I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the narrative voice in Girl Dinner. Like, it was fun! It was a fun read! But I was also surprised that Blake called it a “satire” in the afterword, because it didn’t really feel like it was making fun of Sloane or Nina, it felt like the reader was supposed to empathize with them, not mock them. There were some lines that struck me as kind of satirical, but mostly it was just an occasionally funny book. I think it should’ve been picked up by a litfic imprint instead of Tor, though. I feel like it could’ve been a sharper and more interesting critique (or even, like, actually a satire lol), if it’d been edited by a literary editor instead of an SFF one. The SFF element (which is obvious from the title) was probably the weakest aspect overall. The ending felt kind of… unnecessary? Out of nowhere? I didn’t love that part. But I liked it more than I thought I would overall.

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Fine. I like the publishing inside baseball bits and the thriller bits were also fun. The chapter titles bit was very funny.

The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm

Really interesting. Checked it out based on some post I saw on here that mentioned it, and I really enjoyed reading it. Inspired me to read more Sylvia Plath poetry.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

I don’t think I like Highsmith’s writing style overall, but I did enjoy… how easily Ripley got away with so much nonsense somehow. Watched the movie with Matt Damon in it also and was amused the movie made him both gayer and more sympathetic/less of a cold-blooded freak. He is much more committed to the bit in the book.

Work Nights by Erica Peplin

Kind of boring, kind of funny, at least it’s gay I guess? Doesn’t seem to be saying anything interesting about anything, but at least it’s about lesbians!

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

This took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to finish reading, but I did enjoy it. I mostly read it because Rebecca was not available on Libby and this was Ready to Borrow lol. Gothic romance set in the 1800s, very… moody, ambiguous. I thought it was fine.

Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb

I really loved the art, I thought Tim Sale’s use of spot blacks was really innovative and interesting and the paneling was creative and stylish. However, as I was not inoculated into Cape Fandom as a child, I found it difficult to buy into the basic premise of the Batman rogues gallery. I am trying to be a responsible Comics Person and get Into Capes, but it’s hard, because most cape comics kinda suck in various ways.

Everybody (Else) Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes by Gabrielle Korn

Kind of interesting, but I think the parts where she was talking about broader societal trends were weaker than the parts that were just about herself and her life/work.

Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton

Maybe if I was an obsessive Beach Boys fan this would’ve worked better for me. I found the epistolary framing confusing and unnecessary. Just write the book in second person, you don’t need the letter framing!

Penitence by Kristin Koval

Unfortunately mostly felt like Beartown but worse, because Backman has a very intentional and interesting writing style and Koval does not. Backman also builds atmosphere and environments very effectively, so that it really feels like all of Beartown is telling you its story together, and Penitence develops… some characters a bit. Didn’t like how we stayed out of Nora’s head pretty much until the last page. Also I guessed the endgame reveal ten pages in, while the characters didn’t even think of it as a theory until two-thirds of the way into the book, which annoyed me.

Absolute Martian Manhunter, Vol. 1: Martian Vision by Deniz Camp

The Martian Vision pages were great and I loved the visuals and colors, but overall… I dunno. I understand why my friend who really liked it really liked it, because it’s the same friend who got me a copy of The Crying of Lot 49. I think reading this so soon after The Long Halloween made me tired of comics about men neglecting their families to fight crimes.

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What I read in November!

2025-12-08T01:12:18Z

November reading list! A lot of books because I’ve decided to get into poetry, and poetry books are short. I am not going to share any of my poems with the public with my name on them on account of what if they’re bad. But I started reading more poetry and reading about poetry to see if I can understand it better and if that’ll help me write it better. Anyway, the books.

More Weight: a Salem Story by Ben Wickey: This fucking ruled and I’m telling everyone I know how much I love it in real life. Second of my mad-dash Critic’s Poll reads that made me go “ooh” out loud. I got to meet the editor of this one at Jennifer Hayden’s talk and he was also very excited to talk about how good this book is. It’s a graphic novel about the Salem witch trials, and it is very, very well done. Beautiful art, great character work, works on the macro and micro levels, so well-researched?? Amazing, go read immediately.

Every single page is at this level of detail. No wonder it took ten years to make!

Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno: I don’t know if I would have enjoyed this more or less if I’d read Woodcutters first. In any case, the Single Paragraph structure made it kind of hard to read but also kind of meditatively zen? Not as interesting as I had hoped it would be.

That’s What She Said by Eleanor Pilcher: I had this on hold at the library for like half a year and it was not worth the wait. Might have been worth a shorter wait. I liked the friendship between the two leads and how messy it ended up being, but neither love interest was like. Developed at all. The way the One Guy Beth had a crush one once just so happened to also be demisexual in the exact same way she is demisexual AND into her felt like a convenient coincidence because we don’t see them interact much between learning Beth had a crush on him and them getting together. Which is also annoying because like, being demi is about developing romantic feelings from the basis of a close friendship, but we don’t get to see them develop that friendship first or have much of that friendship on the page.
Also unfortunately tries to be funny but since this is British chicklit every joke just made me think “you will never be her (Sophie Kinsella)”. Or even Mhairi McFarlane. There’s a very high bar to funny British Women’s Fiction.

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser: While reading I went and discreetly searched my docs for the various phrases Mr. Zinsser disapproves of and was relieved to find I know better than to use most of those.
Interesting! Don’t know how useful it is for me generally, but I liked the bit about interviewing everyone possible about a subject and focusing on the intro and immediate hook because I think I need to work on that. I don’t labor over my nonfiction as much as Mr. Zinsser labors over his, but I do tinker. I could tinker harder.

The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz: Ughhhghghgh. Bad girlboss writing retreat toxic friendship thriller novel. The most detached and robotic sex scenes I’ve read since “then he put his thingy in my you-know-what and we did it for the first time” in the fanfiction masterpiece My Immortal. Two paragraphs of the pov character being weird about introducing herself with her pronouns. Not one, not two, but THREE stupid end game plot twists! Why did I even bother reading this. I finished it in line for the Burnout Syndromes concert lol.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith: Okay, I don’t think Highsmith is for me. I was expecting more schemes and plots, but this felt very slow-paced, and it was mostly just being in a very stressed-out and miserable guy’s head, which was not fun. I did not really enjoy reading this one, but I will still check out Mr. Ripley just to see if I like that one better.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld: This one was also pretty slow, and almost… too realistic to be fun? Brought me back to the worst bits of high school and college, lol. But it was easier to read than Strangers on a Train, and I finished it pretty quickly. Reminded me of The Idiot by Elif Batuman. I wonder if it inspired Batuman.
I liked it much more than Romantic Comedy by Sittenfeld, that’s for sure. No one in Romantic Comedy felt like a person, but everyone in Prep felt like people, even if many of them had very fake-sounding names.

Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner by Jennifer Hayden: I read this because Hayden was doing an author talk in town with Summer Pierre, and their author talk was very fun. I love watching longtime friends talk about each other’s work. I actually have not read Hayden’s famous Story of My Tits yet, sorry! But I liked this one, because it illuminated a very different relationship to food and cooking than I or anyone in my family has. It’s a little bleak and depressing, but she makes it funny. And I like the watercolors!

Possession : A Romance by A.S. Byatt: Long! But I liked it. I can see its influence on certain more recent cozy academic-setting romantasy books like the Emily Wilde trilogy. I skimmed through some of the 19th century parts and some of the poetry parts, but I liked the kooky academics all scrambling to get ahold of The Evidence, especially in the endgame.

The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón: I really liked this collection! I like how specific Limón is with her descriptions and references, and how she uses line breaks. It felt very deliberate and structured.

В конце ноября by Tove Jansson: I noticed it was the end of November so I was like “I gotta reread The End of November” and since I had the book in Russian I read it in Russian. I forgot it was the last Moominstory and also forgot everything about every character in it, but man, Jansson’s illustrations are so perfect. I should reread the other Moominbooks also. I actually learned to read Russian on Moomin when I was a kid! My grandma read them out loud to me and made me try and read a paragraph first before she’d read the rest of the chapter. So, lots of fond childhood memories.

I love the hatching… I wish I was good at nib pens lol

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: I’d never read this in school actually so I was surprised to learn I had osmosed absolutely none of the actual plot or events of the story besides the scene referencing the title and that Holden meets a prostitute. Maybe I would’ve liked it more if I read it in high school. I found Holden vaguely annoying, probably because I am no longer in high school.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo: No one told me Ms. Kondo sincerely believes in the healing power of crystals. Otherwise it was fairly motivating and I am totally for real going to Deep Clean next week after the JLPT exam I promise.

Moscow in the Plague Year by Marina Tsvetaeva: I read this in English while also looking up the originals of some of the poems in parallel to see what kinds of choices the translator made and whether or not I agreed with them. Mostly I didn’t, but also translating poetry seems like a horrible idea I would not want to do for fun. Tsvetaeva had such a sad life, but she wrote a lot of happy, sweet poems despite it all, somehow. She wrote a lot of poems in general, which was also weirdly motivating.

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur: I’m trying to understand the state of internet poetry and also my library’s poetry ebook selection is very limited. Kaur’s work is… not good. But there’s something about it that makes me want to keep reading, and I think it’s the same kind of like car-crash voyeurism that makes me click on Twitter vent comics from strangers. I don’t want to hear about how much you love having straight sex, but also… I can’t look away for some reason? I do think a lot of these probably sound better read out loud than on the page, but whenever she throws in One Rhyme at random I get annoyed lol.
Some of the poems could be good with a few more editing passes. Some of the drawings are quite good, some of them look like notesapp scribbles, but all of them have an uncanny vectorized line quality that makes them look more artificial and less appealing. Her persistent anti-intellectualism is infuriating though and I hate that she’s so popular without even reading poetry by other people ever. Still, better her than fuckin’ Atticus I guess.

I liked this drawing a lot! I have cropped out the eyeroll-inducing words on the same page though.

Strange Bedfellows by Ariel Slamet-Ries: Really nice, I’m glad I read it. I loved Witchy when I was in high school, but haven’t caught up with Slamet-Ries’s work in a while. Strange Bedfellows follows a guy who’s suddenly developed the power to manifest objects from his dreams, and a guy he manifested from his dreams (who happens to strongly resemble his high school crush). But he can’t actually fall in love with someone who’s just a figment of his own mind, right? Oberon, Kon, and Oberon’s family and friends were pretty well-realized, though I had some trouble keeping track of who was who exactly in Oberon’s large family. I love the colors and the aesthetics of both the real world and the dream world. The way the plot was resolved made sense to me. It was fun! This one I also had on hold since June and it felt worth the wait.

Erotica Romana by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Project Gutenberg ebook. I think a lot of it went over my head, I don’t have the classical background to understand all the allusions. But the words sounded nice! I preferred the shorter ones.

The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur: I think I felt like if I just read enough of her poems I’ll suddenly Get It. I do not Get It. Some of the poems in this one were more interesting than the Milk & Honey ones, but most of the drawings were less interesting because she was clearly copying other artists (captioning a drawing riffing on Matisse’s dancers as Ode to Matisse for example) or photos. Sometimes there’s unnecessary wobbly borders around pages that add absolutely nothing whatsoever. She uses simple words, but it feels like it’s because she does not know more specific words exist. She says “flowers” where Limón, for example, would name a specific flower and describe it precisely. I wish she was more specific and less trying to be universal, but I guess the universality is how you get 4 million Instagram followers.

Anyway, I’ve written 37 poems in the last couple of weeks but if I start posting them online it’ll be on a secret side account under a pen name. Because What If They’re Bad (and not in a 4 million follower way).

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October reads

2025-11-04T02:41:05Z

In October I read. 24 books. But at least half of them were graphic novels due to a) Comic Con and b) the annual PW Critic’s Poll landing in my inbox and reminding me I haven’t read anything all year and need to catch up so I can make a good list lol. Anyway, on to the list!

Grand Slam Romance Book 3: Farewell to Babes: A Graphic Novel Volume 3 by Emma Oosterhous and Ollie Hicks

What a fun conclusion to a fun series! It’s frankly criminal this trilogy isn’t the most popular graphic novel series out there, it’s so funny and so gay and fun. I want to make something this fun! Longer review of volume 2 up on WWAC if you wanna see.

Сто лет тому вперёд (A Hundred Years Ago Ahead) by Kir Bulychev

I made my girlfriend watch two episodes of the TV miniseries adaptation A Guest From The Future (ON YOUTUBE WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES. We do not speak of the new remake), which made me want to reread the book to remember what they’d changed for the series. It’s a really good children’s book, actually! I feel like Bulychev’s optimistic view of the future really influenced my own science fiction-themed creative work, because this series was my FAVORITE in elementary school. Rereading as an adult, I was really impressed with how realistic and specific each kid character was. There was a whole class of kids and they all felt different but believable. They’re all generally well-meaning but still capable of being petty and jealous and annoying, because they’re literally twelve. They feel believably twelve years old. Even Alisa the supergirl from the future feels like a twelve year old, more or less. And it’s funny!!!

Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa by Akemi Johnson

I did not know how much I didn’t know about Okinawa and its relationship to Japan and the U.S. Military. The book is structured as a series of case studies-interviews with different women living in Okinawa, from Okinawan WWII survivors to American military wives to the half-American daughters of local women and military men. Ultimately, Johnson concludes the bases need to go, but it’s surprising how many locals like having them there because of how much the local economy is tied up in those bases. Really informative and engaging book.

Moderation by Elaine Castillo

This was really fun. There were a lot of sentences that struck me as perfect ways to phrase things while I was reading, but then when I tried going back to find examples I couldn’t seem to pinpoint them. Still, Castillo’s writing felt very elegant and controlled, like her main character. The romance worked really well too, the love interest wasn’t too perfect and he and Girlie seemd to fit together well. Also Girlie’s family was really fun. I read it on the train up to NYCC lol.

Breadcrumbs: Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Poland by Kasia Babis

Read this on the train coming down from the First Second/23rd Street party at NYCC lol. Babis’s memoir examines the realities of being a socially conscious young woman in the deeply Catholic, conservative post-Soviet world of early 2000s Poland, looking at her life but also that of her friends and their families. I remember reading some of her short comics on the Nib and enjoying them, but I liked the memoir more. It felt very cohesive and intentional.

How Could You by Ren Strapp

Also read this on the train down from NYCC due to purchasing it directly from the author there lol. Ah, collegiate mess. If you love disaster lesbians causing problems, this is the book for you!

The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei

I remember reading that this got like a 500k advance and a blurb from Kaveh Akhbar and I dunno I thought it was, like, fine. I thought the random lesbian couple Genevieve meets in NZ was weirdly glossed over if she’s coming from Singapore where homosexuality is much less accepted but I guess she’s writing for a Western audience? It might’ve been more interesting with more POV changes, or from Arin’s POV instead of Genevieve. Surprised by the Akhbar blurb considering the prose in this was... pretty bland, mostly. I guess it’s fine for a debut?

The New Girl by Cassandra Calin

I got this at the Scholastic party at NYCC (signed by the author!) and it’s cute! Very standard Middle Grade Autofiction Graphic Novel, elevated by frankly extremely appealing art and slightly unusual personal backstory (Romanian girl moves to Montreal, which stands out amongst all the middle-American new-kid-at-school books in this genre.) I’ve seen some of Calin’s webcomic strips around before, and I was surprised how well she adapted her style to this full color middle grade look. Cuter than pretty much any competitor I can think of right now. Definitely recommend for anyone with a kid in their life.

Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku, Vol. 4 by Fujita

Reread, I won the Fujita signing lottery at Kodansha House and then didn’t realize we needed to bring a book to the signing and panic-bought this while waiting for my turn to get a book signed. Then read the whole thing while waiting lol. She drew Hanako in it for me. It’s perfect. I can die happy now.

The Internal Sea: Mare Internum by Der-Shing Helmer

Full review on The Beat. I liked it!

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Heard a lot about this and finally read it! I was not expecting the time travel to be back-and-forth and was not expecting Dana to be able to bring stuff with her when time traveling. I really liked her relationship with her husband, complicated but still loving and supportive. Dana was a fun lead to follow. The escalation of the time jumps was stressful, and the slavery parts were genuinely horrifying. More fun to read than I thought it’d be, though.

And The Strange & Funky Happenings One Day by Miyazaki Natsujikei

I bought this at MOCCA in March but I am so so bad at finishing short story collections because each short story makes me feel like I’m done reading so this took me forever to finish. It’s fun! Weird, random, charming. I did like it. It was just hard for me to finish it lol.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Sad! Decent mystery, very strong exploration of the dynamics of both a specific place and specific types of people in that place. I think I did like it overall.

A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Discussed in more detail in this post, this ruled.

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

I had high expectations for this but it didn’t work for me. Too many random unrelated digressions, too little point. Not that funny. I think I was expecting something closer to Sayers’s Peter Wimsey stories. Might watch the Soviet movie eventually, it’s my cousin’s favorite.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman

Inspired to read by liking Help Wanted and a Substack post about what this Type of Guy could look like in 2025. Tne book seemed very observant. I disagree with the Substack post that this guy is based on Keith Gessen, though: no prominent sibling in a similar field (or unprominent siblings, Nate’s an only child), and Nate’s backstory seems more similar to Waldman’s own than Gessen’s. Also, Nate did not start a magazine at any point in the book lol. Lots of people in media are children of Eastern European immigrants, random Substack guy!

Palestine by Joe Sacco

I think this might actually be my first Sacco book, which is kind of wild because I feel like I’ve read his work before? He did a visiting artist talk at CCS that I remember finding very insightful. His style is interesting, somehow both spontaneously stream of consciousness and extremely laborious. I remember he did talk about how long each page takes him to draw. I do want to read his new book about Gaza and see if he managed to follow up with anyone he interviewed in this one. Definitely informative.

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk

Ok the misogyny was infuriating but I respected that Tokarczuk was doing that on purpose and Going Somewhere With It and boy was she ever. Maybe I should read the Magic Mountain for the full experience. I loved the random images and photos just kind of thrown in there for decoration. I want to do that with a novel someday.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Shorter than I thought it’d be, funnier than I thought it’d be, sadder than I thought it’d be.

They Were 11! by Moto Hagio

First half was great, second half was all interplanetary politics that were much less my thing, but the book design and Hagio’s art were wonderful. Great reissue.

Saint Catherine by Anna Meyer

Pretty Good! A good first title for 23rd street. I liked all the characters and I feel like the themes hung together well.

Smoke gets in your eyes by Anaïs Flogny

My friend Lydia’s first acquisition as an editor at Abrams! So stylish, so pretty, so elegant. Classic Mafia Yaoi but done so, so well, like the most perfect Old-Fashioned from an upscale bar.

Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Life, Taken by Force by Ben Passmore

Really funny and creative, and very informative. I learned a lot about stuff I’d previously heard of in passing or not at all, and the bibliography at the end was very helpful too.

Land vol 1 by Kazumi Yamashita

THIS FUCKING RULED. Made me go “ooooo” out loud. Folk horror! Twins separated at birth! Gods which are real?! Fantasy or science fiction?! Who knows! I need volume 2 like right now or else!
I've been posting a lot on Substack so uh follow me on there for manga analysis and things.

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September reads

2025-10-06T21:57:06Z

September books! I read 18 but some of them were graphic novels and some of them... were not good.

Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories by Torrey Peters

This one was great: Three shorter stories and one longer story, all different genres. Each story was in a very different voice that really established the sense of time and place in a short amount of words. I think I liked “Infect your friends and loved ones” and “The Chaser” the most. Stag Dance was interesting.

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (novel), Vol. 1 by singNsong: Got it FROM THE LIBRARY and it is much more readable than the fanTL I must say. I understand the appeal now, the characters are fun and the several layers of metanarrative are interesting. Also if anything bad ever happens to the kid with the bugs I will drop it forever btw.

Spent by Alison Bechdel: She’s back! I like how this felt kinda like a sequel to DTWOF, and I really liked the bright, flat colors that are such a departure from the watercolor washes of her previous books. I did find it very funny.

Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine: Also very funny in a different way, recommended by my internship supervisor. I forgot Douglas Adams was a real hitchhiker before he wrote H2G2. Surprised he drew the line at century eggs when it came to trying new food in China. I like how open he was to all sorts of wild experiences, but also wow was it depressing to read about some of the endangered animal situations they saw. Glad the kakapo’s doing better now at least.

The Pretender by Jo Harkin: Very funny and still believably historical (following an imagined life for a Lambert Simnel, purported to be the last of the Plantaganets in the late 1400s), very tragic endgame, I like that there were lesbians in it.

The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands: A Novel by Sarah Brooks: This did not at all work for me, which is kind of annoying because I expected to love it. A trans-Siberian railway crossing with dark fantasy elements? Sounds like my jam! Alas. There were a lot of POVs but all of the narrative voices sounded the same, and I kept confusing The Professor, The Cartographer, and Henry Gray because of this. A lot of descriptions of things and not as many character interactions as I would like.

Voice Like a Hyacinth by Mallory Pearson: Someone has beaten me to the art school dark academia idea! The central conceit of a senior class competing to see who is allowed to do a full solo show was dismissed by my former fine arts major friend as “so outrageous why would anyone even apply to a school that does that to you”, but even discounting that, the friendship dynamics between the core group didn’t work for me... Amrita is always 100% perfect and nice and always 100% on Jo’s side no matter what, while Jo, Caroline and Finch are all allowed to have flaws and multiple dimensions to them. Which felt a little weird, to me. Also, though all five of them are supposed to be queer, only Jo and Finch have any romantic entanglements (with each other), Saz kinda checks out halfway through and Caroline just fully loses it for some reason all on her own. I was kind of expecting a twist that Amrita’s so sweet to Jo because she’d been secretly crushing on Jo the whole time, at least that would be a fun complication. I felt like only Jo and Caroline really went insane from the pressure, but it seemed like all five of them should have been going insane, together. Perhaps melding into a hive mind of some sort. Instead they all drifted apart. Could’ve been messier! Could’ve been gayer! That’s my review.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: This book read like one of those Reddit stories where you’re not sure if the OP is the good guy of the situation.

Tokyo These Days, Vol. 3 by Taiyo Matsumoto: Somehow forgot to read this when it dropped and caught up now. Man.... no one’s doing it like Matsumoto... I wanna make comics forever and ever or else.

My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff: Somehow extremely absorbing. I started reading it and then couldn’t put it down. Maybe because it’s all relatable twenties problems, maybe because of the lit-world stuff. Inspired me to place some libby holds on some Salinger titles. One of which became available for me to read before the end of the month!

Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross: It was fine, I guess. The way the war stuff was handled seemed. Weird. It was like a fantasy riff on WWI but in an attempt to avoid any geopolitical references made everything depend on gods which, within the universe, are extremely real? There should be geopolitics in your war book I think. The romance was fine. I guess. I dunno. It was fine.

The Comeback by Lily Chu: I did not intend to read three of her books back to back, that was the timing of the holds. I liked all three, obviously, otherwise I would not have read three of them back to back. This one was really good at making me believe the protagonist had never heard of the equivalent of a BTS boy. But also the main character was kind of infuriatingly reluctant to leave her shit job where no one appreciated her and take the nice new job she actually wanted to do. Like girl come on.

Drop Dead by Lily Chu: impeccable scene-setting and good balance of two povs, which is rare for Chu. Also a mystery plot! Fun and also rare for Chu. I liked it.

The Takedown by Lily Chu: the core romantic relationship was great, actually, the career stuff was kind of stressful though. I like the deconstruction of toxic positivity, that was interesting.

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: Well. the first half was beautifully described internet memes I remember seeing years ago, the second half a very intense personal tragedy, I don’t know if I’d call this a novel. I did like Lockwood’s criticism on the LRB a lot more than her book. It doesn’t feel like it has a lot to say about the internet besides “everyone was talking about This One Post, do you also remember this one post” and I did in fact remember all of the posts.

Paris Letters by Janice MacLeod: As a memoir I liked it less than the Salinger Year because it had less scenes and more summaries. I like my narrative books to have scenes. She did have some interesting approaches to life that I cannot replicate due to not starting from an advertising executive salary, but it did motivate me to at least try the damn morning pages everyone else seems to do.

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly: Okay this ruled. Funny, dense, interesting, I love gay people and Russians and half-Russians in New Zealand. Such a good time.

Society of Lies by Lauren Ling Brown: Eh. See substack post for more thoughts on this one lol. (That's right I have a substack now).

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger: Ok reading this one after Society of Lies was kind of like following up a frozen pizza with filet mignon. As established two reviews ago, I really love a good scene, and that restaurant dinner in “Franny” was so vivid and well-described it blew most of the other scenes I’d read this month out of the water. I also wasn’t expecting Salinger to be so funny. I never read Catcher in the Rye for school and cultural osmosis led me to believe it was just angsty teen stuff like The Outsiders. I also put a hold on Catcher in the Rye.

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Got It In Excess: The Playlist, annotated

2025-09-27T00:17:53Z

Link to playlist here.
Fic the playlist is for is here.
Romance ga ariamaru: title drop! The plaintive way Kawatani sings “ariaMAru” just really encapsulated the vibe I was going for with this. And I mean the fic is kind of about going from years of sporadic occasional contact to suddenly spending an Excess of time with each other, so. I like it. I headcanon Kuroo as a gesukiwa liker because they were at their peak of popularity/relevance at around the same time as when he was in college.

Aoi, Koi, Daidaiiro no hi: Everyone I know with the most sophisticated music taste really likes Mass of the Fermenting Dregs. I like them fine, but I headcanon krtsk as having cooler music taste than me, and I do think it makes good train ride music.

Unbelievers: I listened to this a lot when writing my first krtsk fic so putting this on the playlist brings me back to that frame of mind

The stars will stay here: Kino is easily the greatest Russian rock band of all time, but this song’s a bit of a deeper cut for them. I like it! I think it’s fun. The chorus I think is the most relevant (rough TL by me): “I got caught in a net and I can’t get out (doodoodoodooo) / your gaze/ hits me like an electric current/ and the stars, having fallen, will all remain here/forever remain here.”

Yoake no machi de sayonara wo: I like it and having headcanoned kuroo as a gesukiwa fan thought it appropriate to add to the list

Put your camera down (English): I am content with taking in this moment caught in time.

Portugal: another fic’s author notes connected this song to Kagehina which made me scream but also Talking is Hard was my writing soundtrack for most of 2018, and is thus heavily mentally associated with my peak postcanon hq fic production period. Magic spell for making me write.

Watashi igai watashi ja nai no: coke commercial song :sob: but also a fave, and also I think describes Tsukki pretty well.

Do I Wanna Know: AM was my writing soundtrack for my first krtsk fic ever (I associate the album with work because my high school art class always played it start to finish during Work Time lol), for a while the playlist had R U Mine but then I decided this fit better.

Junkie: not thematically relevant I just liked the sound and wanted a Frederic song that wasn’t oddloop lol because they’re a J-indie Band that I think kuroo might like. I guess a little thematically relevant: the fed-up part.

Take me out: yaoi song

Eve Stepper: underrated hitorie banger. I love the melody, the chorus, wowaka’s voice (rip), it fills me with an intense unnamable forward-propelling energy and thus belongs on a writing playlist for me.

Starship Syncopation: I like to think kuroo listens to things like this when home alone.

The Adults are Talking: they’ll get it right some time.

Shunrai: this was not a j-drama ending theme (though yonezu has done several) but if it was I would’ve watched that drama. I love kenshi yonezu so much. This song is on the playlist because I like it and because of the chorus bit that translates to “to give shape to it, to give voice to it, would be so incredibly fraught…”

Hyperventilation: most interesting radwimps song. I think this is what the inside of tsukki’s head sounds like when he’s stressed out lol.

Senkou Shoujo (Put your camera down but Japanese): The English version isn’t a one-to-one translation, so it has a slightly different vibe in each language, which is why I wanted to include both versions. I like both versions!

Ai Ren Cuo Guo: Not a lyrics-based addition for once, I just like the vibes and like imagining krtsk listening to this on the train. I think it sounds nice :) Placement on the list determined by where it sounded best in the musical flow, not where it appears in the story

Sympathy: “now we’ve got that sympathy, what I’m to you, you are to me, let’s go”

Delusionalism: I like how it sounds after Sympathy.

Melancholy Kitchen: I like how it sounds at this point in the playlist, and it’s an underrated older Yonezu where he sounds a little younger and rougher than in his more recent stuff. The song is about a relationship falling apart due to a communication breakdown and one person cooking things badly, so not that thematically relevant, but I like the fun melody and the way it feels intimate and ultimately optimistic.

Hachimitsu: Spitz was most popular in the 90s so I thought it’d make sense as a band for Kuroo’s dad to be into, and then I listened through this album as a test to see if it made sense for the context in which I mentioned it and decided that yes it is in fact totally perfect.

Not Appearing In This Playlist: Lamp Genso, despite being mentioned in the fic. I do think Tsukki would like them/that album, I just didn’t want to listen to it while writing because it’s too slow and downbeat to keep me typing lol.

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Everything I read in August

2025-09-04T20:13:27Z

I read 13 books in August! Here is what I thought about them, in order of when I read them!

Sorcery and Small Magics by Maiga Doocy

Cute! I liked the main characters and their dynamic, and the final twist with the curse lifting was really well-done. Also kind of relieved they didn’t get together at the end so the relationship can develop more in the next book.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Pretty funny! Basically boils down to “ignore the demons in your head and just write stuff down” lol. My friends found the Christianity offputting, but I actually didn’t mind it. It felt like she was clearly framing her religion as something important to her and her life, but not something she was pushing on the reader. I liked the part where she says she likes her characters to be the same type of mentally ill she is, it felt very modern for a book written thirty-plus years ago.

Run With the Wind by Shion Miura

I watched the anime while it was airing so I was excited to read the book! I did really enjoy it, but I was surprised by how much they emphasized Kakeru’s crush on Hana-chan. Also surprised that the narration consistently referred to Haiji as Kiyose while all the characters called him Haiji. I feel like the book was a lot clearer thematically, and helped me understand the author’s perspective on running.

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room by Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, David Mazzuchelli, Lorenzo Matotti

I completely did not get the middle story at all and barely got the other two stories, but Mazzuchelli is still one of the best to ever do it. City of Glass is just so beautifully drawn.

If You Still Recognise Me by Cynthia So

Very blindsided by the fandom angle that was not at all mentioned in the cover copy and I wish had been warned for adequately. The fandom aspect felt very stilted, none of the conversations read like they were happening between real people who exist or real people active in a fandom. The fictional comic they were into sounded kind of like a version of Runaways, but was not in conversation with any other fandom and the three named fans were not in conversation with any other fans or fandoms either. I was half-expecting the online crush to turn out to be the girl from the main character’s past, but they didn’t tie that together at all. Also the cover art was weird— you’d think the viewpoint character would be the one in the front looking at the reader, but she’s actually the one standing in the background? Otherwise it was fine enough for a YA debut I guess.

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

One of the important characters in this book is named Masha so I read it to experience a book with a major character that shared my name. I liked it, mostly! Funny, fun characters, interesting Themes. The character named Masha was absolutely deranged though.

Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Blogs, Memoir, Recipes, and More by Dianne Jacob

I did want to learn more about food writing, so I picked this up! Learned about some authors I had not previously heard of, learned about how people without food backgrounds got into food writing, and learned that, like all other types of journalism, it’s very hard to make money writing about food. Pretty interesting, if not very relevant to me as someone who cooks Occasionally and mostly lives off frozen food, instant noodles and the generosity of my friends and family.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

THIS RULED. This book consists of the (fictional) collected diaries of a half-Mexican half-American closeted gay man who was besties with Frida Kahlo and briefly a popular novelist before the anti-communist push after WWII basically drove him back out of the country, collected by his loyal secretary. Really interesting and fun narrative voice, occasionally very sad story.

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, Vol. 1 by singNsong, UMI

I intended to check out the light novel but got this first instead. It was: fine. Serviceable webtoon to print adaptation. I did read the first volume of the light novel later, but I read this first and it was fine, but not the ideal way to experience this story I think.

Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

Read this on the train to and from Anime NYC for a few days because I realized I was subscribed to the author on Dreamwidth! I really enjoyed it. Very well-constructed plot, evocative sense of place, really interesting, complex characters. I also really liked how religion was explored in here, with the very real local gods but also Christianity and how they connected. Great time.

Endling by Maria Reva

I think I liked it overall? I don’t know how well the meta aspect of it worked (the yurt thing), though I can understand why it’s important to the author. Brought me back to February 2022. I hope the author’s grandfather is okay at least. Kind of annoyed the whole book ended on Paul, though, as he was the least interesting character.

The Friend Zone Experiment by Zen Cho

Also fun! I love the girlboss lead and her gentle piano-playing love interest, did not like how much real estate girlboss’s evil ex took up on the page. I thought the second-chance romance was well-developed and the reasons for them not getting together immediately made sense. Also liked the Best Friend Character and the final endgame twist that I was hoping would happen did happen, thankfully.

That’s everything I read in August! I will read more books in September and in fact I have already read some.

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Anime and comics about GIRLS! WHO! CLIMB!

2025-09-03T16:31:41Z

As some of you may know, I’ve been getting into rock climbing lately. I’m still not very good at it due to my crippling fear of heights and complete lack of upper body strength, but I’m getting better!

So, what better time to watch Iwa-kakeru: Sport Climbing Girls?

Honestly, I did not watch this show when it aired despite some of my friends talking about it mostly because the vacuum-sealed tank top aesthetic did not appeal to me. And the numerous cleavage shots also did not appeal to me. And then I completely forgot about it for the next five years. But now! I remembered it exists!

And so I watched the first episode and I was not impressed.

We open with a cute little cameo of real-life professional Japanese climber Akiyo Noguchi, who is genuinely super cool and whose youtube video on finger stretches is extremely useful. She does her attempt at the problem and then up next is... Konomi, the protagonist of the show.

We then go back to Konomi’s first year of high school and how she discovers competitive climbing. She was wandering randomly through her school grounds and stumbled on a climbing wall, and is then challenged by Jun, the prodigy first year member of the club who won’t let her join if she’s not serious. Climbing immediately appeals to her because, as a formerly almost-pro puzzle gamer, it’s like solving puzzles in real life! The next day the club upperclassmen help the two of them have a sport-climbing competition, and Konomi just barely loses to Jun, but Jun is impressed enough to let her stay. Which is good for the club because they have a competition the next day!

Fundamentally, I believe it is not a well-constructed first episode, and this is why:

The characters are not introduced to each other and the audience in a memorable way, and the sport is not introduced to the audience and the viewpoint character in a memorable way.

From this first episode, I feel like only Konomi and Jun got any kind of personality, while the upperclassmen are just Upperclassmen (Generic.) Which I’d understand if they were trying to introduce a dozen people at once, but there’s only four people on the team! You can introduce four characters in 22 minutes!

As for Konomi and Jun, Jun is very clearly a girl iteration of The Kageyama Archetype but is also, like, unreasonably harsh. You have three people on the team right now! You can’t really afford to turn newbies away!

What threw me off the most was how immediately good at climbing Konomi was. I’ve seen a lot of types of climbing newbies at the gym since I started, and even the people more naturally advantaged than me (tall, athletic, strategic thinkers) can’t just hop on the wall and move perfectly on their very first day climbing. Even if we accept the premise that Konomi is amazing at route-finding because of her puzzle game expertise, it’s hard for me to buy that she can move her body the way her mind wants it to move right off the bat, even if she did ballet as a kid. Unless she went really, really hard at ballet as a kid, and quit relatively recently... but if she’d been playing video games for all of middle school, there’s no way she wouldn’t have lost some of her strength and mobility.

As a casual go-to-the-bouldering-gym-a-few-times-a-week climber, the lack of explanation of how sport climbing worked was really confusing. I don’t have any experience with that type of lead climbing, and it confused me how Konomi didn’t need anyone to tell her how to clip into the bolts or when to switch over. Why didn’t she ask any questions? Did the harness feel weird to her? What about chalk?!

The speed at which Konomi just starts kicking ass at climbing felt very unrealistic.

The climbing showdown between Konomi and Jun had a sequence of still images with voiceover on top of them that felt very low-budget for a first episode of a new anime. Also. The cleavage shots. I did not care for them. It is not against the rules of climbing for teenagers to wear T-shirts.

There’s a surprising amount of manga about bouldering out there! Rock climbing is fairly popular in Japan. I haven’t read most of it, but I did take a look at the first chapter of Strawberry Canyon and it reminded me of Chihayafuru but with rocks. The Berry Canyon gym sounds a lot more professional and intense than the gym I go to. I would probably be struggling on the Grade 5 wall in there, even if I can flash V3s at my gym now. Seems cute! Still undecided on if I want to spend money to read the whole thing.

But the webcomic I’ve been reading since I started going to the climbing gym is actually a manhwa on webtoon called Deadpoint by MAYORAC, and it rules!

Hoji is okay at rock climbing, but her real special skill is the ability to see other people’s “talent ceiling” – the highest they can go in their field before they fail, an ability she developed after her mother died in a tragic accident. When she unexpectedly befriends climbing prodigy Aseong Chae, the two of them start training together to discover if it might actually be possible to overcome all limitations.

I just love the art- absolutely gorgeous bright colors, dynamic poses, smooth shapes and sleek lines. And the main character gets to wear T-shirts! Hoji’s design is so cute. She is so babey.

I like that she’s competing at a high level but still struggling to send the high-level problems, which makes the comp problems feel legitimately difficult. I also like that her relationship with Aseong Chae is a little toxic and messed up. Adds flavor!

Despite Aseong also being a black-haired sports prodigy, she’s not quite a Kageyama because she’s taking a break from the sport entirely, and is serving more as a coach-mentor type to Hoji than as a rival/deuteragonist. Her true motivations in helping Hoji are still unclear and possibly sinister— she’s really concerned with learning about the “talent ceilings” of her and Hoji’s biggest rivals in the South Korean youth climbing scene, and she’s still thinking about the final hold in that Olympics problem that made her fall. Something’s up, and hopefully, we’ll find out what that is soon enough.

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Reading, Watching, Listening: August 30, 2025

2025-08-31T00:56:06Z

I want to try doing these mini-media roundups once a week now. So, how's my week been so far? It's been pretty good. More importantly, how's my media consumption been this week?
Currently Reading:
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters: Approximately 50% of the way through now, meaning I've read the first two shorter stories and about half of the title story. Surprised by the recurring motif of pigs. I like how Peters is interested in the ways people can love and care about each other but also deeply resent each other, for being different or for being the same.
Currently Watching:
My girlfriend and I just finished season 4 of House M.D. (rewatch for me, first watch for them). I remembered what happened in the finale, but I did not remember actually crying at ( [spoilers for whoever still hasn't seen season 4 of House M.D. in 2025] ) It really is a very good show! Sometimes. Skin Deep was a very bad episode.
Currently Listening:
Accusefive's debut album from 2019 (我肯定在幾百年前就說過愛你) which Wikipedia tells me is called Somewhere In Time, I Love You in English. It reminds me a lot of later Walk the Moon. I think the melodies and the way they use synths sound kind of like What if Nothing. But Chinese. I like it!
Life Status Updates
Finished my internship, went to Anime NYC, finished inking my comic for a contest I want to enter in October (still need to do screentones), finished my latest draft of my Slavic Sapphic Romantasy Novel (62k words now! LMK if you want a link ;)), working on my FTH fic again. Hence the Accusefive listening. I decided to incorporate a music motif into the fic for some unknown reason lmao. I went to a KPot with my friends today! I have to work tomorrow. That's all I got for right now! See you in a few days for my August Reads Roundup, in both more and less detail than this.

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Post-Anime NYC Reflections

2025-08-27T17:53:12Z

After the Denpa/Kuma licensing panel at Anime NYC 2025, I wave goodbye to the acquaintance I’d first met at the manga freelancer mixer the day before and walk back to Penn Station alone.
Walking back to Penn Station alone is not in itself a novel experience for me: When I come up to NYC, it’s often to meet up with people who live in the city already. But still, something felt odd about this particular walk. As if I’d left a parenthesis open on my convention experience, and the weekend was still unfinished.
I thought back to my first convention at the Javits: New York Comic Con, 2012. My mother dropped me off by car because, at fourteen, I was still too scared to take the train up by myself. It was my second convention ever, the first being an anime convention at a local community college the previous year. I stepped out of the car next to the badge pick-up line to hear someone yelling “MASHA” at maximum volume— a friend I’d made at summer camp a few months prior, who I hadn’t realized was going to be at the show. (And was cosplaying God Tier Tavros. We’d bonded over Homestuck.) I spent most of my NYCC, and the three that followed, hanging out with my friends from summer camp and a bunch of other Homestuck cosplayers. I looked around the Artist Alley, I went to some silly fun panels like in-character Homestuck discussion panels or “Dos and Don’ts of Lolita Fashion”, and I spent my entire show surrounded by friends I’d made over our similar interests in...mostly Homestuck, but also 2012 Nerd Culture in general. I got to experience the warmth of belonging I mostly didn’t feel in my day-to-day life.
Since my school days, I’ve stopped going to conventions (or shows, as people “in the industry” call them) for pure fun, and started going to them for work, with a Press badge as part of the comics journalism websites I write for now. Or for the potential of future work: when Anime NYC started, I was two days out of my editorial internship with a manga publisher and was cheerfully telling everyone who asked how much I’d love to keep working in the manga industry. Which is 100% true: I loved every moment of my internship and spent a lot of it thinking “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this." I want to keep doing it so badly it aches.
It really is so much fun, to be on the inside of a convention instead of just a fan. Getting to skip the long line for badge pick-up, getting to sit in the Press Lounge (slightly more exciting than the staff break room at my day job), going to panels and not just knowing the people on the panel but knowing what they’re going to announce that day before they make their announcements (and not saying anything about it because I am soooo good at keeping secrets I promise.) I love seeing bits and pieces of the big machine that keeps fandom going, and knowing how everything falls into place to entertain hundreds and thousands of people for one overpriced weekend.
But going to the show For Work also made the show exhausting in a way shows weren’t when I was a student: the feeling of being constantly on the clock, frantically scribbling notes at panels I’d need to write up later, having my business cards at the ready for when I met someone I’d like to stay in touch with after the show. I spent almost all of my Friday in panels and running around from place to place, not getting any opportunity to check out the Artist Alley until the next day. I managed to miss seeing several of my online friends at the event entirely, and the friends I did see I could only overlap with for a few hours at most before we had to go to different panels or events, splitting up with an awkward, “hopefully see you later?” So I never really got to say goodbye properly to anybody because it was hard to be sure if we’d run into each other again later.
And so, when I walked off to Penn Station alone, it was without having anyone to say goodbye to first. I wasn’t sure where my friends were: I think some had left already, and some were at the Seinen Manga panel at the Japan Society on the other side of Manhattan. The cell reception at the Javits is notoriously terrible, so there was no point in messaging people to ask if they were around. I stepped out of that giant glass fidget-spinner-shaped structure into the darkening night sky feeling that quintessential New York City anonymity. Just another nerd with an anime con badge, heading back to real life.
I ended up getting dinner at Penn Station because every place I passed on the way was completely packed, and the timing of the trains worked out so I was scarfing down my fettucine alfredo on the train as it pulled out of the station. I kind of wished I’d been able to eat dinner with someone. And not inside Penn Station. That and the complete internet dead zone that happens between going down to the train platform and the train bursting out onto the surface again really accentuated the isolation.
Would I rather be going to shows like Anime NYC with my friends from school, to hang out in cosplay? Or do I like being an industry person, alone in the crowd of thousands, but with knowledge and access the masses lack? Or would I rather be even more than that: an invited guest, holding court at panels and signings for my scores of adoring fans? ...Well, it might be fun to try that last one someday.

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My weekend as a 26-year-old Across 4 States Somehow

2025-08-12T02:04:25Z

Local comics writer Amy Chu invited me and my friend Christina to carpool with her to a convention she was invited to in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. “Where’s that?” you may ask? It’s approximately four hours away from everywhere: New York, Cleveland, Toronto, Baltimore. The middle of nowhere is the middle of everywhere. So for us it was also about a four, five hour drive. Which is why Amy wanted to carpool for it instead of making the drive solo.

We headed out Friday afternoon, made a pit stop at the Poconos Outlets for some retail therapy and an early dinner of burgers and fried chicken from Shaquille O’Neal’s new chicken restaurant (which we noticed on our way out then had to get something to know how it was. Actually pretty good! Tender and well-seasoned chicken, melty fried cheese curds.) Then we made another stop at the Cute Little Town known as Williamsport to check out the Bullfrog Brewery. We had pierogies, which were deep fried and pretty good but not noticeably tastier than an average pierogi. The butter garlic sauce on them was nice.

I don’t like beer so I had a hot green tea and drove the last leg of the trip. The road was very dark and winding and I was very scared the whole time but we made it, finally, around 10:30.

At which point the front desk of the motel had already closed and left our keys taped up in envelopes on the door.

We went to bed relatively early because load-in and free breakfast started at 7, and we made it to the venue (the town arts center) at about... 7:15ish. The free breakfast was pretty good, being provided by an adjacent bistro instead of the 100-calorie mini-muffin packs and Red Delicious apples I was expecting. No, this had warm sticky buns and soft bagels. Tasty!

We were told doors opened at 10, but the first customers started wandering in around 9:30, while some people were still setting up. The layout was odd: exhibitors were scattered around a number of rooms near but not directly connected to each other, with me, Amy and Christina all up on the second floor. We still had decent traffic, but there wasn’t a lot of time or opportunity to go walk around and have a look at the other rooms. Some panels were outside, with a bit of a roof on the stage for the panelists but the audience chairs set up in direct August sunlight, which I’m guessing limited attendance somewhat.

Everyone was really nice! I sold a lot of prints and stickers, but only one comic, which is the opposite of how shows usually go for me. I was really hyping up my new minicomic that Cart Press printed for me, because THEY DID AN AMAZING JOB, but no one was intrigued enough to buy it. :( I’ll put it up for sale online once I have a little more free time.

After the show we went to The Frog Hut for dinner because they served frog legs. And 24 flavors of soft serve. Everyone else Amy invited declined, so it was just the three of us. We ordered the “hoppers and poppers” (five legs and 3 jalapeno poppers), “yankee nachos” (waffle fries with cheese sauce and onions) and “chicken dippers” (basically just chicken nuggets in batter). And some milkshakes, which were: fine. The frog legs were great, juicy and perfectly cooked. Everything else was at most fine. The yankee nachos were pretty gross.

After THAT we went to the creator meetup at a hotel bar a few blocks down. There was a different hotel with the same name we tried first, but then we ended up at our intended destination. The appetizers were tasty (and, most importantly, included what felt like my first fresh vegetable in two days), and there were two Comic Con-themed drinks: a melon-coconut Incredible Hulk, and a blue curacao-forward Plastic Man. I had a lot of fun chatting with other artists and getting to know them more after not having much of a chance to talk during the show. We wrapped it up by 10:30 because we needed to head out early Sunday morning.

Sunday at 7:30, we had a diner breakfast at a diner that’s been active since the 1930s! It’s in a real luncheonette car! It felt like a time capsule, I loved it. My ham and cheese omelette was perfectly Okay. Christina got the special mango-pear stuffed french toast and it was actually stuffed with yogurt with canned mango and pear on top. Not awful, but I liked my omelette more lol. I decided to get tea instead of coffee and then regretted this when I realized I was dozing off in the car on the way back.

We discovered that Wellsboro is closer to Baltimore than New Jersey, and also that Amy’s son in Baltimore needed groceries. So we stopped at the Costco in Harrisburg and stocked up, then drove on to Baltimore where Amy taught an online class while Christina and I went to the museums. The first museum we went to was the Homewood Museum on JHU campus, which was a very cute house where a lot of horrible things happened. The house was owned by the son of the guy who owned the most slaves in America, who was bad at business, started drinking and then abused his wife and kids so badly she got divorced from him in the mid-1800s. Bad!
But the wallpaper was so cute they had custom scarves and ties with the pattern in the gift shop.

Then we went to the Baltimore Art Museum for about fifteen minutes total, but that was enough time to see some fun art. And even more frogs!

Then we finally started driving towards home, through Delaware. We stopped at a mall in Delaware about an hour before it closed (gotta take advantage of that lack of sales tax!). I got pants at Uniqlo and Sanrio-patterned organizing tools at Miniso (on sale.) There was a Vietnamese market nearby, so we had Banh Mi for dinner. It was very good.

We reached my place at a little past 8 pm, at which point I took a shower and collapsed.

And I guess that was my weekend!

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What I read in July!

2025-08-05T02:18:18Z

I read a very normal 17 books in July, but mostly because all my ebook holds came in at once and I was too stubborn to postpone 3 of them so I was juggling like 6 books at a time. I returned The Safekeep late and had to extend my hold on Afterparties and stay up late to finish the Chee book on time. But I enjoyed most of them!

In reverse chronological order as usual.

Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See by Bianca Bosker

Impulse-bought thinking it’d be useful for my future art school dark academia idea. This was a very fun read! Bosker is a lively narrator who makes her subjects really interesting, though some of the art history stuff I already knew bc I did take art history classes in school lol. Jack Barrett sounds like she was trying really hard to make him sound less evil than he was, but holy shit you cannot treat an assistant like that even if she is a journalist! I should go to more gallery openings.

Hungerstone by Kat Dunn

Writing style reminded me of the writing style of my own languishing WIP (the draft of which I should be working on now instead of typing up this lol). I liked this Carmilla retelling. The vampirism was more of a metaphor, but I thought it was a very effective metaphor. Plot worked.

Among Friends by Hal Ebbott

I finished reading and then looked up the author to see if he was associated in any way with that one guy that said there’s not enough novels about men and their feelings these days, but apparently not. This is exactly the kind of book I’d imagined that publisher putting out though. I did not find any of the female characters convincing; Retsy and Sophie felt the least distinct to me. Claire and Anna’s mother-daughter relationship did not make sense to me either. Otherwise it was like. Fine. I guess. I will probably forget everything about it in a month.

The Most by Jessica Anthony

Very short but enjoyable. I liked the different perspectives and the surprise title reveal. I think it worked pretty well for me, not sure it would’ve if it was longer.

Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

THAT’S RIGHT I’D MANAGED TO SKIP READING THE SEMINAL YA GRAPHIC NOVEL CLASSIC UP UNTIL NOW. Not as brilliant as their later work imo but a lot of fun things going on in this one too. And even early Jillian Tamaki is so gorgeous.

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

I have a hard time reading collections of shorter works. I think it’s bc each short thing feels complete in itself so there’s less motivation to go on to the next thing. I didn’t really love this collection, I think all of the stories together felt kind of samey/repetitive... Then I looked up the author to see what else he’d done and felt sad (accidental overdose before the book even came out ): ) Banger cover art though.

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina Swamidoss McConigley

Read for internship book club lol. Interesting! Not sure if it all gels together smoothly. The section on casting fishing line == caste seemed like a bit of a reach. Goodreads reviewer who said it was confusing the main character called her sister by two different names is a fool. Skill issue. Get good.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

This won a bunch of big awards and I was like no way it’s all that and then I finished reading and goddamn. It sure was. All that. I guessed the twist a little before it happened and screeched through the reveal. Wowee. Possibly book of the year for me.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee

As soon as I read this I could feel it changing how I write nonfiction. I have half a draft of my attempt to explain writing reviews and it smells like this now. My usual resistance to collections of short works didn’t apply as much to this one because the essays flowed together so well it was like they were all chapters in a single narrative, even though they were published separately at first and some even years apart. I want to start a rose garden. I want to write good. After I finished the book I kept going to my reading app and trying to open it again thinking oh I want to read more of that. How do I make other people do that with my books.

Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth

This is what I was talking about with my f/f litfic post. Insanely horny. Unreasonably horny for a relatively short word count. I think I liked it overall.

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

No one told me this classic of lesbian literature started with several pages of an American WASP going on about why Jews have it rough in the world. Very strange. Not as much lesbianism as I was led to believe. Most of the page count is one annoying guy talking a lot. I fear Djuna Barnes may not be my kind of thing after all.

Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

I’ve never been a huge reality TV person, but I have enjoyed a show or two in my day. Have never seen Survivor but I did watch Endurance when I was a kid which was blatantly ripping it off but for kiddies, lmao. This was really interesting. Very comprehensive, going back to the very first iteration of Candid Microphone (a radio show!) and going forward up until The Apprentice, and actually interested in interrogating the racial and gender dynamics going on onscreen and off unlike in that Disney High book I read a few months ago. I feel like I gained more respect for the medium. Kind of want to try watching more old reality TV now.

The Gay Best Friend by Nicolas DiDomizio

I liked this more than I expected because a) I love mess and b) it’s mostly a friendship novel with a romance subplot instead of a romance. The titular Gay Best Friend has to run a bachelor’s and bachelorette party for both halves of one straight couple because the groom’s his childhood bestie and the bride is his adult life bestie, and he is totally cool with everything until he very much isn’t. It’s funny! Very evocative depictions of place and several different, complicated social dynamics. Overall theme of respectability versus staying true to yourself was well-developed.

A Rotten Girl by J. Ursula Topaz

This has some very specific positions on certain internet discourses I do not quite agree with. And then I saw someone I have blocked on Twitter thanked in the acknowledgements and it all made sense. Worse than the discourse though is the way the Twitter conversations are rendered like regular dialogue, and the way absolutely nobody posts like real people post. At least it was short.

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

Not as paradigm-shifting as Songbirds and Snakes was, though some new details revealed here were very interesting. Haymitch as a narrative voice is very similar to Katniss, which I think is the point bc he did say he saw a lot of himself in her, but also makes this feel repetitive when read after the main trilogy.

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft

This book is presented as a (blatantly autobiographical) novel translated by one of the people who appears in the novel, whom the narrator really really hates and whose footnotes get more and more aggrieved as the story goes on. This makes it a very fun reading experience. Even though the narrator is annoying, the translator is more annoyed than I am. It does do that annoying contemporary litfic thing of adding homoerotic undertones for flavor without committing to the bit (like Butter and The Ministry of Time), but at least the object of the homoerotic undertones is married to a woman for once.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

Easier to read than Le Carre was. Somewhat funnier. Not sure I enjoyed it enough to read the sequels. Maybe eventually.

Personal life updates: My internship is going well and I cannot get a full-time job after it : ) still grinding away at the romantasy redraft, hopefully it’ll be normal-book length in time for DVPit. My friend printed a really nice edition of my minicomic for me! Will show off when I am. Less exhausted.

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What I read in JUNE!

2025-07-01T01:08:11Z

I read 13 books that I can tell you about this month! Also, at least as many volumes of manga because... I STARTED MY INTERNSHIP AT KODANSHA EDITORIAL!

It’s been awesome so far and everyone loves me and I get to read comics for money which is all I ever want to do but as of right now I have girlbossed too close to the sun and had to read the F/GO spinoff manga and do spreadsheets about it. It’s ok my other Task this week is reading a manga I’m enjoying so much I could barely put it down when it hit 5 o’clock. Work-life balance is hard when your work is also what you do for fun. And! I got to write cover copy for a volume of Blue Lock!!!!

Anyway, the non-manga books!

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

This took me a ridiculously long amount of time to read and finish and I feel like an illiterate baby admitting this, as every Literary Person I know loves le Carré. I found the movie interminably boring when I watched it in 2011, but I was like, you know, I’m an adult now, surely I’ll appreciate it more in book form now that I’m older and wiser! Wrong. It picked up a lot in the endgame and the surprisingly frank and nonjudgemental bisexuality got my attention every time it was mentioned, but it spent so much time setting up all the little dominoes I almost DNFed before I got to see them all fall down. The like five pages set in Hong Kong did fill me with an intense yearning for international travel. I wanna go back...

In the Vanishers' Palace by Aliette de Bodard

A surprisingly good comp for my WIP, actually! Fairytale retelling in science-fantasy Vietnam. There’s magic and genetics and southeast Asian fruits. The worldbuilding was a little confusing, but I liked the two main characters and their relationship with each other. A short book I think could have been longer to develop the main characters more. I liked them and wanted more time with them.

For Her Consideration by Amy Spalding

So the main character’s Wound in this romance novel is that her ex-girlfriend dumped her by listing out all of her flaws and giving her the list, which also happened to me with my ex-bestie of 12 years. So I was basically reading this to make sure the main character’s friends told her her ex was wrong and evil. And they did, so I was happy. I felt like the main relationship got off the ground way too fast and it wasn’t believable to me that the up-and-coming celebrity would be into the main girl, but I actually did really like the friend group in this one, which is surprisingly rare for romance novels. Sex scenes were also above average, but the book was weirdly unhorny outside of the sex scenes. 3/5 overall I guess.

How It All Ends by Emma Hunsinger

Emma was my grad school thesis adviser and I only now got around to actually reading her first book! Sorry Emma. At least I loved it! Her impeccable sense of humor and understanding of characters really came through here, and her character drawings are so full of life. How It All Ends is about accidentally ending up in high school a year early, and growing up, and having your first crush, and all of the elements in it work really, really well together! Awesome work! In my 100% unbiased opinion of course.

Baccano!, Vol. 11 (light novel): 1705 The Ironic Light Orchestra by Ryohgo Narita

My beloved girlfriend gave me this on our anniversary. saying it’s the first book chronologically so I should be able to read it without reading the first ten volumes. I thought it was okay. I think I just don’t like light novels, which are by definition light on setting and atmosphere and heavy on dialogue and action. This felt like it was begging to be animated. Unfortunately, the Baccano anime did not get that far.

Favourite Daughter by Morgan Dick

I was apprehensive about this one because I have Divorced Dad Issues, but the divorced dad in this book was very very different from mine (namely, my father barely ever drinks at all, and the main theme of this book was actually Alcoholism). I liked watching both main characters consistently make the worst possible decisions at every turn. Also, napoleon cake mentioned! Love that thing.

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

Pretty funny, great sense of place, protagonist kind of sucked a lot of the time but in a fun way. Read for the debut novel square on batmanisagatewaydrug’s bingo. I think it was a good choice for that! A lot of complexity, and it’s clear Younis knows what she’s talking about when it comes to Iraq and fundamentalism and all that.
Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

FINALLY GOT AROUND TO IT AND oh my god college has gone downhill since the seventies if this book is to be believed. I wish I was a lit major in 1973 I would’ve read so many books. I knew going in this was a Fantasy Classic so I spent the whole book like “when’s the fucking magic showing up” and it really only kicks in at the very very end, most of the book is college shenanigans. But the college shenanigans are essential for setting up the magic.

Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby

Read this for batmanisagatewaydrug’s bingo to clear the Essay Collection Square and wow it is obvious Irby is a big influence on biagd’s posting style. I did laugh out loud several times! But I feel like I’d be better off subscribing to Irby’s blog or wherever she posts and getting one essay at a time instead of reading a bunch of them all at once. I think short-form things are less fun for me when they’re all bundled up, for some reason.

Lady Eve's Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow

I generally enjoyed this, I think. The plot was a little too convoluted and it’s not clear what “breathers” do (are they supposed to be like covid masks or like Victorian fans or what are they used for actually) but I thought the voice was pretty fun and I liked the casual Judaism in this medium-distant future. I agree with the review I saw that said it needed to be pacier— the story does have a sagging middle that was harder to get through than the fun beginning and I’m still confused about how exactly the ending shook out. Central romance was fine but not the draw, the draw is the voice and the funky space-Gatsby type world.

Idol, Burning by Rin Usami

This book was very short and I felt mild disbelief that it was allowed to be published at such a short length. But I enjoyed it. Very #relatable in some ways, and it was easy to sympathize with the narrator and her many problems. I wish I was allowed to write novellas!!!

The Trees by Percival Everett

This is my second Everett, the first being Erasure. I like how this was also kind of experimental but in a different way. Surprisingly funny for a book about such a dark topic. I enjoyed reading it as well.

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

This ruled. Idk how well it holds up for the classicists, but as a classics-indifferent reader I thought it was great. Very funny, really good sense of place and time, Irish vernacular felt very natural in Ancient Syracuse. The ending was appropriately tragic. I enjoyed reading this!

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May Reads!

2025-06-05T14:24:47Z

Last month I read too many long books, so this month I read a lot of really short books! I wrote this up a few days ago but only found the time to post it now rip. Anyway, here we go!

My Nemesis by Charmaine Craig

I… don’t know if I liked it or not. I don’t think I understood it very well. Short, but felt like it took a long time to read.

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers

Fun! It’s interesting how much Dorothy Sayers likes her detectives: Wimsey and Harriet are her little blorbos and she thinks they’re so fun and she wants to write about them doing fun things. While Agatha Christie clearly does not really like any of her detective characters as much as she likes her puzzles and mysteries. I feel like it could’ve been shorter though. Still unsure if I wanna try Gaudy Night or not.

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

I think Henry's characterization and framing of the interviewing-an-aging-celebrity setup worked better than the same setup in Evelyn Hugo, but the romance was unconvincing and the final twist didn’t land super well. Also Evelyn Hugo did have more Diversity even if it was also very annoying about it (‘being bisexual… is just like being biracial’ was somehow a repeated motif in Evelyn Hugo. which. okay) I guess with straight white women authors you gotta pick your poison huh. The romantic leads did have convincing physical chemistry, even though the sex scenes were more implied than explicit.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

I Get It Now. So short and sweet but man. She’s so right. Long live the minimum wage service worker.

Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory

Hm. It keeps telling me these women are sexually attracted to other women but without describing any of them thinking about other women in a sexual manner at all. Both POV characters are constantly saying the other is super hot, without describing what is hot about her. Does she have big boobs, long legs, nice eyes? Who knows! Sometimes their clothes are described at least. It's not even that it's not explicit they're not... in their bodies enough? Not having enough bodily reactions to things, or reacting enough to body things, even when doing body-related events like salsa dancing and attending a burlesque show. The sex scenes felt like Insert Finger A into Hole B, rote lists of events with no emotion attached to them. Remarkably unhorny for a book with multiple sex scenes. Felt like an “eat your vegetables” kind of F/F. Also I found it implausible that Taylor's long string of exes were all just totally fine and cool with no longer dating Taylor and that there were zero lingering messy feelings on anyone's part at all.

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

Fun enough, a fairytale twist/retelling. Short and sweet. I wish I was allowed to write novellas.

Cover Story by Celia Laskey

OP said this was originally set in present day and then rewritten to be in 2005 and it was not rewritten hard enough because it does Not feel like 2005 at all. Characters reference memes and fashion trends that did not exist in 2005 and there’s not nearly enough ambient homophobia to be plausible/make the closet thing make any sense, especially with how the characters talk about being gay and out in a very not-2005 kind of way. They weren't even doing Target Pride Collections yet in 2005! I have a weakness for mid-2000s chick lit and that’s why this feels so off to me. It doesn’t sound like the Devil Wears Prada, or Sex and the City, or any of those types of books. But Y2K is in and cool now, OP should’ve leaned into it more! Sex scenes and relationship were both fine enough I guess.
Hilariously the book got one-star bombed by Swifties accusing OP of being a Gaylor which, if that's true, I did not pick up on it because the Celebrity Character read a lot more like a knockoff Kristen Stewart than anyone else.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Very short, but dense. Lots going on. Very clear atmosphere and very direct story.

Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

Very cruel sequel hook, very topical and pointed subject matter. I don’t know if it’s a stylistic choice or the editor just ignored it but none of the dialogue is punctuated correctly? Otherwise the prose is fine and that one Goodreads reviewer was exaggerating. The magic system made sense.

Nicked by M. T. Anderson

FIVE STAR READ: whimsical, funny, entertaining, AND gay. M. T. Anderson is so good at words, the opening and ending both hit so well. Loved, loved, loved. Might have to buy a copy now.

Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire by Ashley Spencer

I stayed up late to inhale this but I don’t know if I’d call this “good,” I was just a disney channel kid at exactly the correct time to be invested in extra lore about my childhood favorite shows. I don’t think the structure worked well, it should’ve been chronological because a lot of the later chapters had overlapping “recurring characters” I guess (like the Jonas Brothers, Miley, Selena, Demi, etc) and that got confusing. The “fall” part in the title happened entirely in a 5 page epilogue, which, lol. Overall feeling was that Disney Channel was really good when the author was at the right age to enjoy it and got worse when they grew out of it. Fortunately this coincided perfectly with the age I was watching it so I had fun reading about things I cared about when I was young.

Like Real People Do by E.L. Massey

Decent fic that doesn’t function as well on its own.

How to Summon a Fairy Godmother by Laura J. Mayo

Not funny but trying very hard to be. Ending was extremely satisfying, but most of the buildup to it was less satisfying. Everyone kept speaking in big paragraphs with no body language or description to break it up, which annoyed me.

Thick as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner

Read for reference on my romantasy wip and I did enjoy it a lot. Reminded me of Nicked lol. I liked the worldbuilding and the characters.
Personal updates: starting my editorial internship next week aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. hopefully it goes well!

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Filing off the serial numbers: when a fanfic becomes a book

2025-05-26T22:41:53Z

Like Real People Do by xiaq/E. L. Massey was a pretty good fanfiction for the very good webcomic Check Please! By Ngozi Ukazu (who btw has a new book coming out and it’s gonna be so good), that then filed off the serial numbers and got republished as an original novel by a real, small press, with an editor and everything.

Except for some reason the only changes made to the version that was published as a fic on AO3 were the character names (for the characters originally in Check Please!) and some biographical details of not!Jack and not!Bitty. Jack Zimmermann became James Petrov (JAMES?! JAMES?!?!? We’ll get to that later), Kent Parson became Alex Price, Eric Bittle became Cody Griggs, etc, etc. Vegas was changed to Houston and Samwell, in a decision that feels like a personal attack against Me Specifically, was changed to Princeton.

It doesn’t really work.

As I said on social media, in a fanfic, you can just cut to the fun stuff without having to bother with any setup because the setup was already done for you in the source material of whatever you’re fanfictioning. You don’t need to describe Samwell in a Check Please! Fic because the reader already read the webcomic, they know what the campus and the Haus look like. In your original novel you do need to describe Princeton (and the unimaginatively renamed “house”) at least a little bit because your original novel readers will not have that context.

I was surprised when the airport was only a 20 minute drive but I guess they flew in to Trenton? Not gonna fact check if they have Houston to Trenton flights but I’m pretty sure Frontier does not do first class. I was also surprised that when visiting a town, or even like, the American north for the first time, the viewpoint character (as far as there is a viewpoint anyway, we get very very little introspection on either Eli or Alex’s parts) does not have any inclination to describe it. Or the “house.” I was expecting to see at least one line about the ivy covered buildings on campus, or at least a namedrop of the main fucking street, but nope. Which grocery store did they even go to was it the fancy Italian place or McCaffrey's or what. They get “Boba Teas at the coffee shop on campus” which is not a fucking thing you have to go to one of 5+ bubble tea shops directly across the street from Princeton Campus if you want a boba tea, because Princeton is a specific, distinctive, REAL PLACE THAT EXISTS AND YOU DIDN’T CARE ABOUT IT!!!

Ok Princeton Local sidebar over back to business.

Eli and Alex both feel like side characters in their own story– because they're barely changed versions of an OC and a minor antagonist in a fanfiction of something else.

It’s fine that we don't get a lot of interiority from Eli or Kent Parson in the fanfic because the reader just wants to see their blorbo Kent get with the perfect boy for him. In an original novel, the barrier to caring about Eli and Alex is higher. It feels odd how peripheral Eli's skating career or college friends are to the story, while Alex's hockey stuff is at the forefront, but it makes total sense in a Check Please fanfic because no one comes to a fanfic for the OCs, they're here for the characters they already know and like from something else.

I feel like to make this story work as a novel, it needed a lot more editing than it got. I read the fic version before it was taken down, and every single scene and line of dialogue was basically unchanged from what I remember reading on AO3. Even the parts that pissed me off. Actually those parts got worse.

Enter James.

French Canadian hockey dad haver Jack Laurent Zimmermann became Russian-American hockey family scion James Petrov (now with two older brothers, Eric and Mark, which are actually ok names for second gen Russian Americans to have). JAMES!!!

Most immigrants I know at least tend to name their kids things that are easy to pronounce in both their native language and English, which is why almost every Russian American boy I've ever met was named Anthony, Alexander, Daniel or Ben. (Which makes it extra funny that the American character is named Alex in his story lol). Or something Jewish because Russian Jews. No Russian parents would ever name their kid James, because there is no J sound in Russian and you want grandma (and in this case probably the Russian sports press too) to be able to say your baby's name properly.

I was willing to let this slide under the assumption that James is a second generation immigrant without strong ties to his country of origin, but then he's described as switching to Russian when he's angry, having a slight Russian accent (because Jack Zimmermann has a French Canadian accent) and as wanting to play for Russia in the Olympics (very weird, if you know you're queer already, and it's some year between 2014-2022, and your parents probably left Russia for a reason!) So like. Why tf would his parents give him an English-English name.

Additional Russian nitpicks I remember from the fic version that are still in the book version: no one makes their own pelmeni for fun unless they're masochists because the grocery store version is literally fine and diy pelmeni is a lot of work for not enough reward, the Russian word for recipe is pronounced “recept” so idk why someone would substitute it for “cooking plays” in a conversation, blini are usually eaten with savory toppings or with jam, not “strawberries and a pale pink sauce”... I don't understand why like. If you're getting tradpubbed. You wouldn't do your due diligence on this part at least. Find a Russian and ask a few questions. Blah

The other book I read that was filed off fanfic did a lot of edits, preserving the best jokes but also merging, removing and changing the genders and nationalities of characters, restructuring scenes and plot points, and adding new things entirely (and toning down the romance by a lot because this was a Russian slashfic and the censorship hammer came down hard). It was a very good fic and a very strong original book!

I wish the author of Like Real People Do was willing to be edited more.

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What I read in APRIL

2025-05-07T19:08:18Z

Here’s what I read in April! Not as much as March, unfortunately.

Personal updates: Please Read My Webcomic and also My Yachi/Saeko fanfiction

Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki

This book seemed interminably long for no reason. The fatphobia was so insane, I thought I was losing my mind every time the main character (my height) started going on about how she gained sooooo much weight and everyone was treating her sooo differently because she was just soooo super fat now and then the actual weight she claimed to be is still underweight for our height????? ALSO THE QUEER UNDERTONES THAT WENT NOWHERE?? LIKE. I wish someone told this author that lesbians are real outside of all-girl’s schools too. I think making it gay for real would’ve been the only way to save it.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

I quite liked this. I also think it might’ve been improved with more homosexuality, but I found the endgame het couple(s) pretty endearing and fun to follow, and the setting felt very realized and believable. The characters were all pretty fun, and the questions of class and money weren’t as glossed-over as I was expecting them to be. Pretty good!

After this book there’s a 2-week gap in my storygraph and try as I might I can’t remember if I read anything from my library or otherwise during these 2 weeks. Maybe I had a fanfiction rereading moment. I do remember TWotM took me forever to finish, but surely not two full weeks, right?

The Will of the Many by James Islington

Stupid long, but quite fun. Interesting systems. More of a puzzles book than a characters book, which is fun every once in a while. Only kind of felt like a pitch for a film franchise. I liked it overall, will probably check out the sequel when it drops.

You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

PERFECT FICTION FLIPPED EVERY ROMANCE NOVEL SWITCH IN MY BRAIN INHALED IT IN ONE MORNING AND IT GENUINELY MADE ME HAPPY TO BE ALIVE AGAIN.

Perfume & Pain by Anna Dorn

Pretty fun! I enjoyed the antics, but I think they could’ve been even more antical. I liked watching Astrid get her life together. I think Exalted was more fun overall, but it was fun seeing some of those characters get referenced again.

Tampa by Alissa Nutting

Harrowing, nauseating. Very short but took me a very long time to read through because I had to keep taking breaks. Effective!

Audition by Katie Kitamura

I’m not sure I’m intellectual enough to Get Katie Kitamura. The central conceit was pretty interesting though.

A Merry Little Meet Cute by Sierra Simone, Julie Murphy

So much fun! Really genuinely funny, really likeable characters who are believably super duper into each other immediately, solid stakes and tension and supporting cast, also almost every named character is queer? Iconic. I genuinely really enjoyed reading this to the point that I bought a paperback copy of it when I saw it in a bookstore on Indie Bookstore Day.

Black-Winged Love by Tomoko Yamashita

A 2008 anthology of short BL one-shots by Yamashita, a mangaka I already like. A theme that pops up in a lot of these one-shots is how being gay affects the characters’ community and families, which is something most BLs tend to not think about. I like that focus on the wider world outside the main couples. Also the “read Mishima” panel was even funnier in context.

Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress

Almost but not quite what I want to do with an art school dark academia. I liked the revolving viewpoint characters and how they all saw each other so differently, I loved Louisa and her thing with Karina, and I found the descriptions of art and art-related stuff very believable. Now I want to write MY art school book lol.

40 Love by Madeleine Wickham

Very good for a first book, but definitely not at the level of her later work. The class and money and Britishness was really interesting, I wish Ella had more of an impact on the plot and didn’t just quietly slip out at the end. She should’ve burned the house down or something. More lesbianism would’ve improved this book also.

A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon

My first time reading a book that desperately wants to be a webtoon. There was no reason for the narrator to not have a name. Very short. Lovely illustrations, though. Should’ve just made the webtoon.

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I made a formative books list

2025-04-10T02:22:58Z

Like all the cool kids. Anyway I'm young as you can see here

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What I read in March!

2025-04-03T21:40:51Z

General announcement: succumbed to the siren call of a cash prize and started posting a Webtoon in this year’s contest, please read it and like share subscribe (there will be 5 more episodes, updating every Monday)

I read 16 books in March but it felt like less because each book seemed to take me forever to finish. At least most of them were good this time!

( The Books! )

Tsuge review here.

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What I read in February!

2025-03-04T04:14:23Z

It was a very slow month at work so I got a very normal amount of reading done! Structured in order of when I read them, because I have a narrative arc in the middle there.

( The Books! )

Check back in with me next month when I read... probably less, because our busy season is starting up again and also I have less hours in March for some reason and I mostly read at work lol.

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[booktuber voice] RANT REVIEW: THE HONEY WITCH

2025-02-17T16:23:02Z

I'm on a sapphic romantasy kick in search of comps for my WIP. The Honey Witch came onto my radar because I went to a panel the author was on at NYC last year and she seemed fine on the panel. Surely her book was at least readable, right?

I finished this book and told my friends "I don't think I like reading anymore."

The Honey Witch broke me.

I've read bad books before. I'm kind of a hater, honestly. But I've never read a book that fails so comprehensively on every possible level after being put out by a big 5 imprint with at least two editors and a literary agent having worked on it.

From basic grammar errors (you don't go on walks "throughout" an island, you walk "around" it) to logical inconsistencies (the entire premise of the stupid curse) to whole sections that read more like outlines of chapters than actual chapters, to structural problems (why do we open with Marigold's family stuff instead of her with her grandma already? Why do we fast forward past her relationship with her grandma developing to her grief? Why did we establish that tattoos were illegal and that Lottie has them in the SAME conversation??), this book felt like reading a teenager's first nanowrimo attempt. I've read Wattpad novels with stronger fundamentals than this (admittedly not many but still.)

I returned the book immediately after finishing because it felt like having it in my home was a cognitohazard but here's some examples from the free preview on Google Books:

"Now close your eyes and drink this. When you open them again, tell me what you see."

She takes the honey potion that will allow her to access her full power.

How does she know the honey potion will do this? Why didn't Grandma just say that? Why is it in narration like this?

Then there's this part of a conversation where Marigold's dad lets her go with Grandma:

"Because I know your grandmother very well, and your siblings, and most of all, I know you. And I know what you've always wanted. That's why I never stopped you before, and I'm not stopping you now."

"But mother--"

"I know her, too. She is only trying to protect you, so much so that she cannot see how it is harming you. Perhaps it is the artist in me, but I've always thought it so romantic to have beauty and creation as your purpose. And that is the life ahead of you, Marigold. I have every confidence in you. Your mother will see that soon, too."

This conversation happens way too fast, and it's severely lacking in body language or other descriptions for Marigold's dad. The last paragraph especially should be broken up into smaller pieces. Yeah, you don't technically need dialogue tags for a conversation between two people when you know who's talking, but the rhythm here is just shot!

I have a big problem when I write my own stuff of not expanding enough about things that matter, which is why all of my attempts at novels come out too short on the first pass. It's kind of infuriating to see a properly book-length book have the same kind of structural issues I run into at half that length. Like surely someone could've told you to expand this at the draft stage right.

Other people have talked about the tattoo thing, the inconsistent curse, the bee death and revival, the grumpy sunshine romance that's only grumpy sunshine aesthetically and actually grumpy/grumpier in practice, but what bothered me the most was the... Bad sentences, that led to bad everything else.

The author mentioned she wanted to write about the grief she felt over losing her grandmother, which surprised me because I'm very close to my own grandparents and am highly sensitive to fictional media where grandparents are harmed in any way (the opening to the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors always made me cry as a kid because I love my grandma too much to be mean to her like that lmao). The bonding with the grandma part, grandma dying, and grief processing in the Honey Witch were all so glanced over in favor of the romance that should not be happening in the first place due to the whole curse situation that it barely even registered to me.

Naomi Kanakia said no matter how old you are or how well read you are, your first attempt at serious writing will always read like a 12 year old is doing it. I felt this very strongly here. It was that bad on a basic sentence level. I wish the author had like, practiced her craft more before she started querying this book. She mentions revisions and beta readers and multiple drafts on her blog, but I can't even imagine how much worse that first draft could've even been if this was what it looked like after significant editing. I wish someone fucking stopped it from making it to press in this state.

If this was self published or a kindle exclusive niche thing I'd be like whatever, but this was put out by fucking Orbit! Respected SFF imprint of Hachette! In the US and the UK! Every single person who was supposed to make this book better failed at their goddamn job, and it made me lose faith in the publishing industry as a whole.

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What I read in JANUARY 2025

2025-02-04T01:17:29Z

Unrelated personal update I POSTED A COMIC IT'S 48 PAGES OF ART SCHOOL TOXIC GIRL FRIENDSHIP GET THE PDF HERE ok anyway.

I don’t know how I read this many books in a month, especially the longer ones. Some of them are graphic novels, I was off work for a week and then when I did work it was insanely slow and thus conducive to reading time, and I did skim a lot. But a lot of these were really good!

Presented in the order I read them because:

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe REALLY started the year off on a good book. I loved Margo’s narrative voice and all the characters surrounding her, and I really wanted to see things work out. It was funny and sweet and yeah sad at times but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s a book about a college student who suddenly finds herself a single mom and so starts an OnlyFans and how both of those things affect her life and the people around her. It just… it just works so well.

The Whole of Humanity Has Gone Yuri Except for Me by Hiroki Haruse

Gift from my girlfriend <3 the premise is incredible, the attempts at a plot were not as incredible, but it was a cute quick read and overall fun enough.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Those 1870s rich people sure could pine. I mostly found myself feeling bad for the women in the story, and also for everyone else in how deeply restricted they were by such arbitrary social rules. Which I think was the point? Trying to read more Classics these days anyway.

Averee by Dave Johnson, Stephanie Phillips

Gift from a friend. Really disappointing because the premise sounded right up my alley and both author and artist seemed to be very experienced professionally, but the overall story was thin and shallow and the art was stiff and uninteresting. It felt like if it was twice or three times as long and also used the basic setup differently to explore the actual social impacts of its conceit it’d be more fun.

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

It was fine. I think this would’ve hit harder if I was reading it as an exvangelical, but I have only ever experienced American Christianity from the outside, so. Probably my last Tingle book, I don’t think I really vibe with the writing style.

The Fury by Alex Michaelides

We get it you really liked The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. (Also maybe Lolita?) I feel like the author was desperately trying to pull off a specific kind of likeable-unlikeable narrator here that ultimately fell flat with me. He was just too obviously scheming. Sorry for the spoiler I guess.

I Think Our Son Is Gay, Vol. 04 by Okura

It was ready to borrow on Libby and I couldn’t remember which volume I’d read last so I impulse-grabbed it. Cute, short, sweet. I totally forgot everything about the supporting cast since the last time I checked in on the possibly-gay son. It’s cute though!

Edison by Pallavi Sharma Dixit

THIS RULED. EXTENDED REVIEW HERE. I LOVE IT, NO NOTES.

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

I was not expecting this book to be about the horrors of drug addiction and pain and obssessive personalities, but as an exploration of those things it was fine.
Taiwan Travelogue by 楊双子, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

It's always nice to read sapphic historical fiction by a lesbian. The main character is annoying but in a kind of fun way, and the food descriptions made me put the book down and run out to the local Asian food market for wintermelon tea and braised pork over rice. I think people who think Babel is a nuanced and complex look at colonization and imperialism should read Taiwan Travelogue.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

I was interested in checking this book out for a while because when I worked at the bookstore I could see its VAST LENGTH on the shelf and was frightened and intrigued by it. Then it was ready to borrow on libby and I was like great I don’t have to lug a brick around. Then I realized I had to read the brick. It felt like it took forever and at least two of the viewpoint characters felt superfluous as consistent throughlines, but I liked the lesbian subplot and the language and worldbuilding was interesting, which was mostly what I was reading it for. I liked how the fictional lands were both distinctly fantastical and clearly inspired by real-world equivalents.

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

I finished Priory and then immediately needed a palate cleanser so I reread my fave. Still good! Still fave. Despite the het.

Heart and Seoul by Jen Frederick

Absolutely deranged that this book says ON THE FRONT COVER that it's a romance and yet the main couple ends the book not together for reasons of family drama scandal situation. I don't think you're allowed to do that! Romances are supposed to be happy endings! Otherwise it was both more and less intrigue kdrama plot twisty than I expected. I liked the one roommate that got character development but I wish the other roomies did too.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

I disagree with her philosophically on the matter of quotation marks for dialogue. Otherwise I really did like the relationship between Ivan and Margaret a lot but Peter’s head was kind of annoying to be in. Too Joyce 4 Me. I like how his love triangle works out in the end that was a fun choice.

The September House by Carissa Orlando

This was fun and unsettling. What if you moved into a very haunted house but you were totally fine with it because you had a system and you were coping and then your daughter comes to visit and is like mom what the fuck? The way in which the narrator was unreliable here was really interesting. To me.

I Am Not Jessica Chen by Ann Liang

I am a known Ann Liang stan so when I say this is her best book so far I'm being very serious. Also I am never reading it again because it made me sob and brought me back to the worst parts of being the dumbest kid in the smart kid classes at my high school. It hit very hard. I enjoy reading her funny stuff more. But this is a very good book.

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

I like this matriarchial kind of 1840s English village situation. I feel like I learned a lot about a very small and specific world. It didn't spark with me the same way it did with whoever I was reading on dreamwidth that mentioned it but it was nice.

The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher

Not as good as Dear Committee Members sorry.
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account Of The Everest Disaster

HARROWING. I have developed new phobias of things I didn't know I needed to fear. Did not know oxygen deprivation did that to people! Also the back and forth with Boukreev as described in the post script was understandable but very sad.

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I just read Edison by Pallavi Sharma Dixit and it RULED

2025-01-15T18:09:09Z

Okay SO.

I was expecting Edison to be more of a traditional romance novel, and was already mentally bracing myself for the inherent cringe of the romance novel structure and writing style as applied to A Place I Have Been To Multiple Times. Instead I got something much more expansive, interesting and FUN.

Edison is about this guy Prem who's the youngest failson of a rich family and the only thing he likes to do is sit in his room and watch movies forever. He's soooo miserable and pathetic, everyone is ashamed to be around him, but most of all Prem himself is embarrassed to be the way he is and yet can't figure out how to change it. He tries to make a movie production company, it fails horribly, he runs away to America to try something else and immediately loses all his money and ends up crashing on a mattress in some tiny apartment with a bunch of strangers and working at the gas station down the street. This ends up being the best thing that could have happened to him. He falls in love with Leena Engineer, the beautiful daughter of the local grocery store owner, but her father does not approve of his precious daughter being with a random gas station employee with no ambitions! (They do not know his father is insanely rich.) So he has to make a million dollars to win his future father-in-law's approval, and win back Leena's heart! (Because she could not forgive the way he listened to her father first instead of trying to figure out a way to be together without her father's approval.)

For most of the first half of the book, Prem has no ambitions or goals, and this is frustrating to literally everyone around him. It's a little hard to watch the protagonist be so aimless for 200ish pages, but it works because the rest of the cast is so much FUN. And I think it's only really possible because of how long this book is and the long timescale it spans (almost twenty years) that you can keep track of such a large revolving cast of neighbors and aunties and coworkers and roommates and family members.

It's also really funny-- I was quoting lines out loud to my mom when I was reading on the couch the other night. It's so nice to read a book with actual jokes in it. I feel like recently I've been reading a lot of books that felt like the writer did want to write something funny but also felt writing actual jokes would make it too easy, or something. Not this one though, there's jokes! With punchlines! That made me laugh!

It's also a rare book about movies that feels like a movie without being too self-conscious about its own desire to feel like a movie. I feel like Valente often runs into that, where she gets too into her own voice and overdoes it and it just ends up seeming kind of cheap. Dixit's writing style is pretty plain on a sentence level, but does a lot with its structure. It reminded me of Midnight's Children, but with less magical realism and more extremely well-observed realism. It's so easy to sink into and so hard to put down. I just really enjoyed it all the way through. The love story is dramatic, but not over-the-top about it. Prem slowly growing into himself is so so satisfying! Just watching him transform from someone so desperately afraid of other people to someone who realizes he loves and needs lots of people around him, and who goes out of his way to talk to strangers and make them feel comfortable on purpose, was really nice.

I grew up in the second Highest-Percentage-of-Indian-Americans town in New Jersey after Edison, which is half an hour away from me and which I visit at least a few times a year. Accordingly, about a third of my childhood besties and classmates were Indian American, so I'm familiar with some of the cultural stuff mentioned in this novel via lunch table osmosis. It did feel New Jersey to me for sure. Also I did academic decathlon the year the theme was India, so while the only Bollywood movies I've seen (PK and Three Idiots, the first only dubbed in Russian, as screened to me by my father who is a bit of a "thing, India" guy despite being Russian, and the second once in Russian and once with English subtitles at my friend's birthday party) were made after the time period covered in the novel, I recognized a lot of the Bollywood people cameos in a "Lata Mangeshkar from my Music Resource Guide packet mentioned!" kind of way. I don't think knowledge of Bollywood film is necessary to enjoy this book, but it would probably enhance it. My bestie did say "that's a super Bollywood way to start a story" when I was telling her about the first few chapters I'd just finished, but I mean. I think it really worked.

Anyway, I enjoyed reading this book and I hope you read it and enjoy it too!

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Humor and comfort in fantasy literature

2025-01-05T04:12:27Z

My reading preferences are more similar to my mother's than I would like to think.
My mom has read pretty much every piece of SFF literature available in the Russian language, including translated classic American stuff like Harry Harrison and Zelazny. Since the invention of the web serial, she's mostly been reading those, also in Russian but otherwise very similar in subject matter, tone and quality to SFF webnovels from East Asia or the US. (The main difference is that Russian portal fantasies don't usually involve dying and reincarnation, afaik. Her favorite is one called "the elf bull.")
She doesn't like anything too bleak, grim or depressing. She likes funny books with quotable lines that she then reads out loud to me hoping I'll share in her mirth. The word she uses to describe her preference is стёб, a word which the internet tells me means "banter" but my mother explains as "a kind of sarcastic, self-critical sense of humor". Мне нравится стёбные книжки, she says. She's the one who introduced me to the Discworld series when I was in middle school.
I find the term "cozy fantasy" deeply and profoundly grating, even when I like a book and then find out other people categorize as "cozy fantasy" (Howl's Moving Castle, which??? I GUESS???). Part of this is probably my inherent contrarian hater nature. But I also don't really understand it as an emerging genre. A lot of the more recent books I've seen categorized as such seem to hinge on the protagonist actively leaving a distinctly uncozy scenario, such as a war or revolution in which they are a principal figure, to run a small business in the countryside, a scenario I also find uncozy due to my not great experience as an employee of an Independent Bookstore Everyone In Town Fucking Loves Because They Don't Know How Badly The Staff is Treated (it's fine. I'm fine). (I am thinking of the plot summaries I've read for Legends and Lattes, Can't Spell Treason Without Tea, the Spellshop and like five other things I just opened in a new tab from this Goodreads list of cozy fantasy titles.) I guess for some people that element of escape is relatable, and the catharsis of leaving something dramatically horrible to then arrive somewhere peaceful is something that appeals to them? But for me these kinds of stories are not interesting or likeable and in fact kind of annoying. It's like... I don't like it when I can feel the author trying to make me feel a specific emotion, but I don't mind it when the author is trying to make me laugh if it works.
I don't read to be comforted. I read to be entertained. Like my mom, I want to read things that are funny, maybe even funny in a kind of mean way. Even though I make a point to read a variety of genres, the books that tend to hit best for me are the funny books. The стёбные книжки.
When I was pitching my new idea (a workplace comedy set in a fantasy bookstore based on my very real bookstore experiences) for the upcoming webtoon contest to my friends, a few of them were like "oh that sounds like a super cozy fantasy slice of life", and I immediately went like "no no way I don't want to do that". Besides my reflexive haterism of Cozy Fantasy, plotless slice of life is way harder for me than comedy as a genre.
I have a lot of respect for good slice of life media. Hirayasumi was one of my best reads of last year. A good slice of life makes small things (e.g. buying groceries) seem bigger and more entertaining without making it melodramatic, and to do it well you need to understand realism and character very very deeply. It's so easy to make slice of life feel boring or shallow.
Personally, I am very shallow, and also, I love jokes that make me laugh for real.
So as soon as I mentally reframed my new comic idea as a "fantasy workplace comedy", the story ideas for it started flowing and wouldn't stop. A workplace comedy means my characters can be mean to each other if it's funny. A workplace comedy means things are allowed to go poorly if it's funnier that way. A fantasy workplace comedy means people can end their days covered in slime. I'm drawn to imbalance and toxicity in my comics in a way my prose usually avoids. I think the pictures let me access a part of my subconscious words alone don't.
I don't wanna do a cozy bookshop story. I wanna do It's Always Sunny in Barnes & Noble: Ankh-Morpork location. Wait no: God's Blessing On This Wonderful Barnes & Noble. I haven't watched IASIP or Konosuba I am going off vibes and will also probably tone down the awfulness a little bit.
Really I wanna do Shortpacked! with wizards and jokes about whatever the latest booktok discourse is instead of transformers jokes. I've been rereading Shortpacked! to get a better idea of how to structure a workplace comedy webcomic and it's still great even if I don't understand the transformers references lol.

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LAST READS OF 2024

2025-01-03T01:07:13Z

Also the Rom-Commers which I read in November and forgot to track.
According to Storygraph I've read 170 books this year which is a normal amount probably. I didn't track every manga volume I read though so it's technically probably higher. Anyway, let's go!
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
I don't like it when authors use words in a foreign language that have a direct english translation to make the thing seem More Foreign, and I didn't like it in this either. "Dochka" THAT'S JUST DAUGHTER COME ONNNNN Really good overall though, the building tension felt legitimately scary and it felt believably of the time period it was supposed to be set in.
Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
This worked well for me. The leads have a Book!Howl/Sophie, Maomao/Jinshi, Grumpy Nerd Girl/Magical Prettyboy Who's Super Into Her dynamic I always love, and the footnoted historical fantasy worldbuilding wasn't quite up to the JSMN bar but did get closer to it than some other contenders. I choose to believe the fairies cancelled homophobia in this AU and that's why the major side couple was butchfem lesbians. Unfortunately their existence did make me wish the main couple was also butchfem lesbians. It was fun!
I think my biggest quibble with it is the journal entries did not feel like journal entries, especially not like journal entries a person like Emily would ever write. Leon's POV in Beth O'Leary's The Flatshare is the kind of writing style I'd expect someone as no-nonsense as Emily to journal in. I enjoyed it, but I did not immediately rush to check out the second book.
Help Wanted: A Novel by Adelle Waldman
As a current retail-adjacent customer service employee and former retail worker, parts of this book felt so real they hurt. A lot of it was very funny, and the end result was honestly kind of a relief. I liked it.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
I feel like this book spent the most time on things I wasn't interested in and the least time on the parts I was interested in. As a result, kind of a slog. I
understand they were only in magic school for half the book bc we're being subversive Harry Potter for Grownups here but I wanted to like, experience magic school more than post-magic school ennui. I think the speed at which this book passed through a fairly long timespan made the character relationships feel less developed to me.
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler
This was funny and I liked it! I like Davi and her various entanglements. Overall kind of felt like a web serial I'd read chapter by chapter with my friends in a discord server. Not surprised OP cited So I'm A Spider So What as a major influence, I could feel the spider aura. I will probably seek out the sequel when it drops.
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
Nonfiction! I think I liked it overall. Klein uses the framework of "I get confused with another person named Naomi online" to explore a lot of different dichotomies and dualities. Easier to read than I was fearing.
You Belong with Me by Mhairi McFarlane
Nowhere on the cover or introduction to this book did it mention that this was in fact a sequel to another book from a decade ago, not until the afterword. So I found myself wondering "why does this feel like the sequel to a book about these two characters get together" the whole time I was reading it. I did like it, but I probably would've liked the first book more. Get-together stories have more built-in tension than staying-together stories, where the tensions usually end up feeling more manufactured, I think. But McFarlane is really good at developing characters that feel real and specific and interesting, and I generally like her work.
Not in the Plan by Dana Hawkins
UGH it was so bland and forgettable I can't believe I wasted five bucks on this ebook. The author was doing a storygraph giveaway for the third book in this series that sounds more up my alley dynamic-wise, but this was so..... It's just not very good. Also at one point a character describes bubble tea as "creamed" which I think should be a crime maybe.
Vita Nostra and Vita Nostra 2: Работа над ошибками by Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko
Twitter mutual pressured me into reading the sequel right after the first book but I did them BOTH IN RUSSIAN SO HUGE W FOR ME! I liked it. I really felt for Sashka and her relationship with her mom was the most interesting part for me. I really liked Lisa in book two, but liked the sequel less overall because I missed that mother-daughter dynamic. It was surprisingly easy to read in Russian for me. Apparently the English translation Jelly-Donuts's pirozhki and kefir, which is kind of funny to me.
As far as the magic school books this month go, I understood The Magicians better, but I felt more emotions, was more attached to the characters, and wanted to keep reading Vita Nostra more.
Murder Falcon by Daniel Warren Johnson
This RULED. I tweeted about it when I finished. This is a graphic novel that operates on "what is the maximum coolest thing that can happen next" and just does it every single time. Really fun ride. Great reading experience.
Worry by Alexandra Tanner
I do not understand or see the necessity of this ending. Kind of refreshing to read a Bleak 20-something Sadgirl book focused on a toxic sister relationship instead of a boring man obsession for once, but otherwise, I dunno. Didn't really vibe.
Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath
This was also very fun! Beautiful watercolor, creepy serial killer story. I liked it. So did, apparently, everyone else I know who also read it!
Far Sector by N.K. Jemisin
I wanted to try one of the DC compact graphic novels because I don't really read big 2 comics much, so I asked my comic shop guys which of them's the best to start with and they suggested this one. It was okay I guess. I don't think superheroes are really my thing. I liked the meme people.
*The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center
I mixed this book up with How To End A Love Story bc they're both about screenwriters and honestly they're both kind of eh but in different ways. HTEALS I think is more ambitious. This one is very weird in that it does not show a single word from the screenplay the two characters write together, which I don't think I've ever seen in a Book About A Character Writing Something before. Not In The Plan showed Mack's novel in progress! Why can't we see the rom-com!
Anyway, happy new year! My New Year's Resolution is to stop watching/reading negative reviews about books I don't like/have not read.

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