bloodygranuaile

I was having a slow morning at work Tuesday, during a week that I had been assured would be very busy (the busy has not happened yet), so I took a short break mid-morning to pick up my copy of Tamsyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth, which the bookseller had to pick out of a giant pile of pre-orders. I was pleased that the pile, and therefore my copy, had black-edged pages.

Having decided that I couldn’t attend the launch party in Brookline because I thought I would have to work late, but then not in fact having to work late, I consoled myself by curling up with some fancy (sort-of) coffee and binge-reading the shit out of it, with only a few snack breaks.

First of all I am pleased to report that my guess on who Nona is–both the body, which was pretty obvious, and the soul in it, which I flatter myself was somewhat less so–was correct, although there was a lot I did not predict and could not possibly have guessed about both the consciousness that is Nona and also everything else. John did overtly confirm a bunch of stuff that I had previously picked up on but hadn’t been said in so many words about before the Resurrection. Also, like, wow, John is such a fascinating character (he sucks, of course, but he’s a great character).

It is entirely possible that, despite what Tamsyn and her editors say, Nona did not absolutely need to be an entirely separate book, but I still enjoyed it thoroughly so I am overall pleased that it did turn into a separate book. (I also have a soft spot for quartets; nobody writes quartets anymore.) Trying to figure out what’s going on through the eyes of Nona, the most ignorant character alive (in her defense, she is only six months old), is often challenging but at least as often a smugly pleasant exercise in dramatic irony, since the reader has presumably read the first two books and Nona has not. The constant oscillation between “aha I know things Nona doesn’t go me” and “help I have no idea what the fuck is going on” is probably not going to be every readers’ cup of tea, but it probably is exactly the cup of tea of the sorts of readers who made it this far into the series anyway, because we are all gluttons for punishment, especially if that punishment is very funny.

I’m not entirely sure what to say that wouldn’t constitute spoilers because in this series the terrain of understanding of what is going on shifts every couple hundred pages. We get some fun new characters in Blood of Eden, including the long-suffering and appropriately named cell commander/faction leader We Suffer and We Suffer and the deeply obnoxious Pash. Nona works at a school where she is in a gang of hilarious children, mostly of the preteen and early teen variety, who have hilarious names like Hot Sauce and Beautiful Ruby and Honesty (it’s funny because he’s a pathological liar), except for Kevin, who is named Kevin. The six-legged dog on the cover is named Noodle. Noodle is a good boy.

We also get John’s whole accounting of the Resurrection and the events leading up to it, which is fascinating, because John is a dick, but he’s telling the story and manages to sometimes make a plausible-sounding case for how he’s just some guy and the whole situation got away from him because so many of the other players in the story are also dicks. I think it’s also great because earlier in the series the question of “What if God was just some guy” comes off basically as a comical conceit, but by the end of this we’ve taken a real serious deep dive into why it’d be very bad for God to be just some guy, and also John’s constant “I’m just some guy” schtick paired with the “setting himself up as God” thing makes me want to throttle him (he’s not even wrong per se about either side of it; it’s just an infuriating combination). I do have some sympathy for his palpable frustration with the half-dozen trillionaires’ selective animal welfare concerns. There’s people committing crimes against humanity left and right and John gets discredited not for any of his crimes against humanity, but for his crimes against hamburger meat. Fucking typical.

The main plotline for most of the book is that the Resurrection Beast known as Number Seven is hanging out over the planet that Nona is hiding out on with Pyrrha and Camilla Hect and the ghost of Palamedes Sextus. This drives any necromancers in the vicinity mad, but there aren’t that many, at least not anymore since Number Seven has apparently been hanging out there for a while. There’s a lot of complicated plotting and intrigue between various cells of Blood of Eden and defectors from the Nine Houses, including the entire Sixth House, which seceded from the Empire and is now being held hostage by a particularly hardline Blood of Eden wing. Ianthe, piloting the preserved corpse of Naberius Tern, shows up to negotiate on behalf of the Emperor and to generally be a douchebag to everyone about everything. She arrives with a SURPRISE COMPANION that has upset the fandom greatly (in the best way). A lot of politics and fighting happens. Nona understands basically none of the political situation but her preternatural skills at reading body language mean she does pick up on a lot of information that is useful for the reader and would probably be useful for the other characters if Nona communicated it to them in a timely fashion, which she frequently fails at, because all sorts of shit keeps happening all the time and Nona is an easily overwhelmed baby.

As usual this book is incredibly Catholic in a way that really highlights just how fucked up Catholicism is, and is stuffed with references to the Bible and Shakespeare and Poe and ancient Greek drama and also the internet. This continues to be the only book series written truly and completely in my native tongue as a terminally online millennial nerd. I am, for Reasons, trying to remember what year Cask of Amontillado memes got really big on Tumblr. Might have to go read some classics to keep myself occupied until Alecto comes out.

It is almost time for Nona the Ninth and, in the interest of being minimally confused (unlike when I first read Harrow), I figured that meant it was time for a reread of Gideon the Ninth (and hopefully I’ll be able to fit in Harrow the Ninth sometime in the next two weeks as well).

While I continue to largely enjoy this book because it is pitched directly at me personally in a manner that makes me want to bang my spoon on the table and chant “One of us, one of us,” I also am genuinely hooked on wanting to know what the goddamn deal is in this Catholic-but-worse-because-God-is-just-some-douchebag Empire. Rereading definitely let me pick up on things I’d missed or just sort of blown past in earlier reads. Rereading also lets me gain a deeper appreciation for just how fucked up everyone in this series is, which is always fun.

Am I gonna reread this series every year? I will at least until it’s all published.

Having read all of her family memoirs, I decided it was probably time to check out the comic strip that made up most of Alison Bechdel’s career. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For is a big 400-page compilation of 21 years of comic strips, starting in 1987, which, quite coincidentally, is also the year I was born. Reliving all the news headlines of my lifetime from birth to when I became old enough to drink, through the point of view of a bunch of cartoon Midwestern lesbians, was quite something, or possibly multiple somethings. I am only sorry that the cartoon seems to have ended shortly before Borders Books and Music went bankrupt in 2011, since I think that would have led to some very funny strips.

But in addition to the… well, sometimes it was nostalgia, about things that were actually timely to the publication of the strips collected here–my own personal beef with Borders, hanging out at Pandora Book Peddlers in high school (Pandora was a bit less radical than the Madwimmin Books of DTWOF; it did have to survive on Waverly Place in Madison, NJ, after all) (also, the founder just died a month ago? That’s what I get for nostalgia googling). Anyway. In addition to the trips down memory lane, there was also a lot more relatable content than I’d expected regarding the everyday nonsense of queer adulthood: various flavors of left-wing crankery are indulgently lampooned; the characters hit a variety of traditional adult milestones–or don’t–in a disorderly mishmash of timeframes and are always surprised; interpersonal conflict is reframed in grandiose political terms in order to avoid resolving it; grand political problems are turned into hippie-ass lifestyle choices. Some of the exact trends in left-wing and pseudo-left-wing goofiness are a bit dated; others are not as dated as I wish they were. The more-or-less main character, Mo, is an absolutely insufferable lifestyle cop, whomst nonetheless is gravely insulted if you call her a liberal (the strip where Harriet calls her a liberal when they’re having an argument amused me far, far more than it ought to). Mo is eventually surpassed in her lifestylism by utilikilt-wearing hippie dad Stuart, who gets increasingly intense about urban homesteading even as Mo’s resolve to consume ethically gets worn down over time by her big-spending girlfriend Sydney and also just life in general.

I am a particular fan of all the little jokes that represent our world outside the characters–riffs on popular brand names, cartoonified news broadcasts, absurd fake products. Despite Stuart and Sparrow’s attempts to raise their child solely on eco-friendly vegan crunchy granola food, little J.R. obsessed with a cereal called “Frosted Fruit Bats.” A Jane Austen merch display at Bounders (or is it Bunns & Noodle?) features a Pride and Prejudice tea cozy, which I think would legitimately be a popular item; a CD of “tunes to do needlework to,” which I would legitimately buy; and “Emma: The Novelization,” which had me wheezing for a good five minutes. The various fake “Dykes to Watch Out For” compilations in the introduction, in which our cartoonist freaks out that she’s been writing this strip for 20 years and forgot to get a job, are also gold, ranging from “Paleozoic DTWOF” to “DTWOF: Curse of the Black Pearl.”

The sense of aging really came through to me in the later comics, which might also be partly on me as a reader–I have been feeling very mid-thirties lately as I have quite recently hit a whole bunch of milestones that once seemed impossibly far off: paying off my student loans, paying off my car, house-hunting. I do like that the characters get older–including the kids, who are not stuck forever in cherubic infancy a la Family Circus, but grow up all the way into bratty teenagers before the book ends.

Some of the plotlines seem a bit repetitive when condensed into one volume–dutifully freaking out about every election; serieses of affairs, relationships, breakups, and arguments about gay marriage; characters getting landed in and out of therapy. All the same, it’s a very entertaining portrayal of a bunch of deeply neurotic weirdos who are, by virtue of being deeply neurotic weirdos, just like everyone else after all.

Two friends recommended Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire to me in a very short space of time, which was really just as much prompting as I needed to pick it up when, three cocktails deep, I stumbled across it being sold at a steep discount in the middle of Harvard Square. Did I have any idea what it was about? Not at all! But it’s a Tor book and it seemed vaguely in the Disaster Queers in Space genre, and many of not most of my favorite recent discoveries have been Tor books about Disaster Queers in Space, so I was willing to pick it up on the strength of the author’s name being closely networked with the likes of Tamsyn Muir, Ann Leckie, and Martha Wells.

This strategy did not fail me and I am reasonably confident in saying that if you liked the Imperial Radch trilogy you may also like this book as well. It is a big sprawling space opera featuring an outsider who gets caught up in the inner machinations of an empire at war with itself, although in this case it is also at war with the small independent mining territory that our protagonist, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, hails from. It’s got culture clashes and palace intrigue and a conspiracy that requires several hundred pages of complicated uncovering, and some Deep Thoughts on cultural assimilation and empire, and an understated sapphic romance. In an unusual twist the big all-devouring evil empire here seems to be based on pre-Conquest Aztec civilization, which makes the hostile alien threat outside of both Stationer and Teixcalaanli space just that bit more intriguing as a plot point. (I assume fighting the alien hostels is the subject of A Desolation Called Peace, and I plan to get around to verifying that assumption reasonably soon, once I… uh… *looks at the TBR pile of doom and sweats*)

The core of the plot here is a murder mystery--Ambassador Mahit’s predecessor has mysteriously died, and the last 15 years or so of records of his memory that Mahit ought to have had access to have died with him, so she and her cultural liaison, Three Seagrass, and Three Seagrass’ mischievous best friend, Twelve Azalea, have to try to solve the murder and figure out what sort of machinations the previous ambassador was involved in and try not to get killed themselves. All the Teixcalaanlitzlim have names that are like [number] [common object] even though all the other empire words are jaw-cracking pseudo-Aztec sci-fi monstrosities like “Teixcalaanlitzlim,” but you get used to it, especially if you read a lot of sci-fi. It gives the book a very specific texture about what’s being translated and what’s not; I’m sure Martine has her own logic about how she handled it but I was mostly just rolling with it because I wanted to find out who was going to get into what sort of trouble next.

Despite it being a reasonably big novel--at 450 pages, it’s not that long for a space opera, but it’s not exactly short either--I read the whole thing in the space of about 36 hours, which did mean I ended up neglecting everything else I was supposed to do yesterday, but oh well. It’s going on the shelf of queer faves with slick black covers, now that it’s been moved off the shelf of queer TBRs with slick black covers.

 While I generally consider my fanfiction days to be behind me, I cannot avoid periodically dipping my toes into the world of reimagined 19th century Gothic classics, although as I get older and crankier I am finding myself with less and less patience for the ones that I think are done poorly or betray a shallow understanding of their source material. That does still leave me plenty to work with, though, whether it’s sensationalistic TV mashups like Penny Dreadful (minus the last two episodes of Season 2, which we will pretend never happened) or experimental niche content like that Carmilla webseries I totally intend to watch one of these days. So when I saw Silvia Moreno-Garcia posting on Twitter about publishing an English translation of a cult Mexican queer horror novella about the voyage of the Demeter, The Route of Ice and Salt, I had one moment of “Am I really going to pay twenty whole US dollars for gay Dracula fanfiction?” and then promptly answered myself “Yes.”

 

I had intended to do this in January immediately after my reread of Gideon the Ninth but then life and book clubs got in the way, so it was only this weekend that I finally reread Harrow the Ninth, the second book in Tamsyn Muir’s certifiably insane and gothically delicious Locked Tomb trilogy. Notable occurrences upon second read, especially so soon after rereading Gideon, include “I understood what was going on a lot better,” “I caught more hilarious references that had apparently passed me by the first time,” and “OK now it’s actually quite clear what’s going on, I can’t believe I was so confused the first time, did I read this in a coma or something,” although the more likely culprit is just that my close-reading skills have atrophied in the 10 years since I’ve been in school from doing only business writing where the actual task at hand is to just find the simplest big-picture points to distill out of a page of writing. But in novels, it turns out sometimes the details are important! 

Anyway, while most of this book is a lot darker and more fucked up than the first one, especially in the beginning, there were still several moments where I couldn’t help actually laughing out loud, a thing that rarely happens for me when I’m reading, and which especially hadn’t been happening this week, when I hit one of those walls where I got tired of doing responsible shit and just dropped all my coping mechanisms and opted to go ahead and be miserable for a bit. It was also frankly sort of soothing to read about people having a way worse time than I’m having and not necessarily powering through it like emotionally unbreakable protagging machines. 

Because Harrow is a tiny nerd, this book did not inspire me to do between-chapter workouts as much as Gideon did, although I did manage to roll off the couch and make myself do 15 minutes of yoga about halfway through it, which is more than I’d managed all week. Neither did it inspire me to make soup.

A few years ago at Christmas, my mom and my brother and I went to see a stage adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith at the A.R.T. While I remember some things about the play very clearly and others not at all--including most of the plot, and, sometimes, the title, leading me to occasionally wonder, when it was brought up, if it wasn’t a stage adaptation of Amberlough that I’d seen, since I haven’t read that either--I remember enough of the general Dickensian vibes that it has stuck in my head as being somehow a Christmas story, like A Christmas Carol, even though it is not actually a Christmas story at all. But as I think it is one and it’s December and also somebody recently reminded me that it was a novel before it was a play, I figured now was a good time to read it.

In September there was a day that, probably coincidentally but maybe not, was a big publishing day for YA by trans and non-binary authors, and my social media feeds were flooded with them, in one memorable case all arranged by cover color theme in a rainbow. I remember that particular display because I remember, skulking gothically all the way at the purple end, a matte black book with lavender-silver foiled lettering and some vaguely occultish-looking drawing on the front, titled THE SCAPEGRACERS. I had not been in a very YA mood lately but I also have been around publishing for long enough to know that people work very hard on book covers and you absolutely should judge them, so I clicked through, surmised that it was supposed to be sort of like The Craft but gayer, and decided that I had to read it ASAP, given this year’s rules for fiction reads. I admit I had some apprehensions because the author is like 22 and I am not ready for the zoomers to be publishing—they are too powerful already—but there are a limited number of books about socially inept queer goth girls with magic powers, and I had already read the other two earlier this year. So I borrowed THE SCAPEGRACERS as soon as I could.

 I was supposed to do all kinds of admin stuff on Sunday but didn’t, because I was still existentially exhausted from Saturday, so instead I read the entirety of Rory Power’s YA sapphic body horror novel Wilder Girls in one sitting.