juushika

So, adopting a cat during a pandemic sucks.

( Adoption backstory. )

And, reader, despite that the cat was broadcasting "I want nothing to do with you, pls fuck off," I adopted him. There was no immediate click! I don't know if I was doing it because it felt like this cat or no cat. It just felt right to take home someone so scared, to give him a quiet place to become himself. I brought home "Orlo" on May 22.

This was his listing:



lol what a terrified face. When he came home he didn't leave the carrier until I tipped him out and set it up as a den, and he absolutely shat it in on the drive home, poor creature.

( A dozen cat pictures under this cut. )


(August on right, then left, then left in last.)

Because I was meeting a new cat every day, it took a long time to decide on a name; I didn't make my final decision until I was in the parking lot waiting for his first vet appointment. He's October, for the same reason August is August: because they look so alike; because my dress, my sail. He's mostly called Toby, or Tober; sometimes Crime Boy.

He does many crimes! Adjusting to a new cat is always hard; adjusting while grieving for another cat is worse, because any time I felt uncertain I would wish to have Gillian back. He's an energetic, lively cat; August has to enforce her boundaries, I have to keep him stimulated. Honestly this isn't the type of cat (or household dynamic) that I was looking for.

But I was right, that they all have stories. I took my grief and loneliness as impetus to conduct a scary, exhausting cat-hunt. I took a risk, and gave a scared cat the room to find himself. And he did! They're each of them, every cat, a person—complete, individual, dynamic. The longer he lives here, the less skittish he is but the better he's able to entertain himself; he tests his boundaries but also learns them; he accepts more and more touch; he's evidently happy, brilliantly happy. And you can be overwhelmed in a household with a cat like that, and I am; these are overwhelming times (I say as if it encompasses COVID, BLM, my grandfather dying) and nothing can alter that. But you can't be lonely. Tober leaves no room for loneliness, little room for sadness. He overflows love.

Toby is about a year old, the vet confirms. He wasn't neutered until then, so he has moderately robust jowls and shoulder muscle. His background is a mystery; his health is great. His face and chest fur is shorter than August's, his side and back fur shorter and darker than hers, and ridiculously glossy as he adjusts to his daily fish oil. His tummy fur is curly and long, scattered with red, grey, and white; he has white hair in his ears. His tail is unconscionably plush and fluffy, and so emotive. His eyes are mostly yellow with just an inner rim of green, where August's are mostly green with just an outer ring of yellow. His toebeans are unexpectedly light, almost purple. Before I met him, I told Teja that October "looks a lot like August, but is that the boring choice aesthetically????" and what a fool was I, because having two cats who look deceptively similar but have a million perfect differences to love and memorize is actually the best aesthetic choice. He's beautiful.

And thus I have another cat! A very very good cat.

I write this every year and, very occasionally, actually post it in a timely fashion. Here's the best media which I consumed, but which was probably not released, in 2018.

Books

I read 156 books in 2018, down from last year (176), and I don't mind. It was a long, awful year; I forgive myself all perceived imperfections.

( Reading wrap-up musings. )

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner
To say a book made me cry or laugh in public feels like too easy praise, makes it seem loud or mawkish; this is neither. It's graceful, playful, critical; the language is precise, the humor lively. The wish fulfillment functions both as social criticism and an escape, and transforms a quiet, charming text into something remarkable.

Mortal Fire, Elizabeth Knox
I've compared this more than once to Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock, a connection I draw because of similar demographic but mostly because they capture wonder, discovery, and self-creation in parallel ways. This does smart thing with magic and its protagonist is smart with magic—a marriage of worldbuilding to character arc makes for a phenomenal conclusion.

Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, Diana Wynne Jones
I read the entire Chrestomanci series this year, and they're all fun. But these two books are a rung above—Wynne writes great magic and big endings and critical, compassionate characterization, and it's that balance, and her fine humor, that make these so very good.

Honorable Mentions in Books

An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon
Not one of the 5-stars (the ending isn't flawless), but so vibrant and so angry, the sort of book that reminds that a laundry-list of marginalized identities isn't virtue signaling but is an intimate lived experience—wrapped, sometimes, in the intriguing trappings of a generation ship.

Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde
A masterclass in intersectionality, in no ways dated, in fact still progressive. And beautifully written! Lorde's insistence on being self-possessed while being self-interrogative is vibrant, present, demanding.

William Shakespeare
Relegated only to honorable mentions because I imagine he will be on this list next year—but these early plays were in no ways a warm up or a limitation: I discovered text I'd previously overlooked, and they were remarkable.

Nods also to: C.J. Cherryh, reoccurring name on these lists; Carol, Patricia Highsmith; Deep Dark Fears, Fran Krause; the act of reading series, which I took to late, which frequently makes for lesser individual books, but which has a distinct cumulative value.

Video Games

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
Perfect in every poly, right down to the round, plastic-looking, individual leaves. The action elements suffer, but the puzzle aspects, the level design, the artificial and superbly detailed interactive-diorama environments, made this the purest and most charming game I played in 2018.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
To my surprise, this may be the best open world game. It's beautiful, fluid, introspective; absolutely underwritten, but with mechanics that mostly compensate, and the steady, significant time I sunk into it was justified. I love the Korok most of all, and the fact that it's obligatory collectibles which bring the world to life.

Stardew Valley multiplayer
Stardew Valley has been on my best-of before (in 2016), but multiplayer was a completely different experience and perhaps the only thing that could improve the game. It was engaging and demanding, from the planned minutiae of early-game multitasking to the perfect, practiced synergy of managing a maximum-capacity farm. I played this with Teja, and it's one of the best friend-things we've done.

Honorable mentions in video games

Pokemon Gold and Silver beta sprites
"But this isn't a game, really!" And that's fair. But Gen 2 has always been my favorite gen, and the spark of life that came with this discovery, the chance to see favorites anew, to glimpse a parallel-universe Pokemon and consider how the games and designs are made and why they work, was fantastic.

Pikmin series
My Nintendo-discovery, which began with Kirby and then with Zelda, extended into this franchise and I loved every bit of it: the use of scale, the absurdness and cuteness set against the fridge horror. "Lots of tiny pieces making up a whole" is top-tier aesthetic, and even better when the tiny pieces have idle animations.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
This is what games should do when they set out to explore the strange and titillating and unique elements of mental illness/minority experience: do actual research; create a better, more immersive product as a result. This is small, maybe too modest, but what it does right it does superbly.

Visual Media

Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Not only was this a rewatch, it's a rewatch I started 2017—and it's still my favorite visual media of 2018. The strongest Star Trek, the one that holds up best, the one with tropes and dynamics and worldbuilding and characters I most love. It was necessary escapism and catharsis when I needed it most, and the work of processing my dad's diagnosis would have been different and worse without it.

Great British Bake Off
I'm surprised this hasn't been on a best-of before, but it makes sense—these are a little slight, a little fluffy. But slight, fluffy, warm, kind, and mindless was what I needed in late 2018, and (re)watching everything on Netflix provided exactly that.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

The Good Place seasons 1-2
This surprised me: sincerely funny; sincerely unexpected and/or clever plot progression. I haven't been so consistently engaged in a new show, least of all a comedy, in a while.

The Witch
I didn't get around to many films this year, and have forgotten all of them but this: a film that crept up on me, that works better in retrospect, which uses its ending to transform its dirty, dire tone into wish fulfillment and an aesthetic strength.

Killing Eve season 1
"Hannibal but ladies and jokes" turns out to be a delight, hardly redundant, beautifully indulgent in its tropes and unexpectedly successful in tone. Sandra Oh is phenomenal, inhabiting Eve's flaws and desires and fluid internal conflict so convincingly.

TW cancer, death.


As anticipated, my parents confirmed a few days ago (the 20th?) that my father is ending curative treatment and switching to palliative care. He's working through a local hospice, with the goal of staying in-home as much as possible and, ideally, throughout the process. We're looking at 4-6 weeks until he dies.

He says that, according to hospice workers he's talked with, the end is easier and faster if the patient has accepted death. So much of this is a mental process—for all of us. Acceptance and grief have not been linear. I thought I had done a lot of work to come to terms with things, and I had; but now it feels real in a way it didn't before—and it very much felt real, then. My family anticipates me being the weak link, the not-strong one, on account of my mental illness, which is accurate and appreciated. But I still owe it to him not to make my suffering another burden on his experience. It's complicated.


Miscellaneous and related:

The apartment we most were interested in got nabbed right before we made a decision, which means compromising and/or starting from scratch, so Dev & I have mostly decided against the move. The pros and cons are so evenly weighted that the tipping point is simple inertia: commutes either way, but getting me home is more accessible in the current arrangement; stress of money/moving is roughly equivalent to stress of being in this house; not moving gives us more disposable income for quality of life improvements. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We have such a limited window to tackle this before Devon is neck-deep in a busy final term & I'm lost to the crazy that it will almost definitely not happen, but it was a nice fantasy while it lasted.

Missy/Teja/my California frando finally sent me some packages of things from his cast-offs (bedsheets! two sets of modal bedsheets!) and touristing (pokemon plush!) and misc. (chocolate!) that he's been holding onto for in some cases multiple literal years; the two boxes were separated in transit & arrived yesterday (21st) and, fingers crossed, later today. There could be no better time for a care package—the anticipation of arrival and concrete evidence of love & support has been a light in some dark dark darkness.

The above ^ has had me thinking about using the "if we don't move, more disposable income" money to figure out like a ... dead dad advent calendar? A list of small, relatively frequent things to look forward to. One of the things making the next few months so hard is the perfect storm of awful—of houseguests & school & terminal illness overlapping such that there is literally no relief, no counterbalance. It's endless, it's 6 weeks-4 months of things being 100% shit all the time. Things after that will be bad, too—I cannot conceive of healing from this grief. It took me a decade to heal past college, and I'm still not quite done—and that was different; not, in some ways, smaller, but still smaller. But when I'm doing that longterm work, it will be less complicated by other egregiously bad things.

So if packages help, maybe other things can help? I don't know how to combat andohenia & the fact that I almost never consume media on release schedules. Can I make "obtain game/show/book" something on that list when there's an infinite backlog of relatively easy to obtain game/show/book, and when consuming a thing comes to feel like joyless work? ??? What "stuff" can I obtain instead, while maintaining a moderate budget & while I anticipate future moving and generally dislike having stuff? Do I have to exclude autumnal activities like "make applesauce" and "go on walks" on account of the agoraphobia? What's the item to activity balance? Anticipation is much of the distraction, the most accessible (so far) emotion that isn't sadness—what are concrete things that require a modicum of waiting?

A list of potentials:
- BPAL (got back into wearing my extensive, beautiful, aged collection lately—autumn/winter are their best months—this is both budgetable & small/easy to transport)
- buy TV show that isn't on Netflix/which we've been unwilling to pirate (Star Trek: Discovery? Hannibal s3? Killing Eve?)
- black teddy bear (I got a new teddy for my birthday whom I fucking love; I now have all my dream teddies except for black teddy bear & backpack teddy bear)
replace eyes on some preexisting teddy bears/make bowties for some teddy bears/modify my own backpack or bag teddy
- reinstitute weekly date night
- obscure books which have been too obscure to obtain without ordering
- Pokemon dream plush (whimsicott? cottonee? commission a lifesize? commission a shiny beta pokemon?)
- Critical Role s2; binge enough to catch up & look forward to weekly shows?
- any new games that I do care to play on release (makes me wish that literally anything were coming out this year. I'd even put "buy a Switch" on this list if there were!)
- track down these Bebe figures
- TBR of rereads/things I don't need to review/spoopy and autumnal books
- regular coffee outtings (on way to/after trips home, sometimes?)

(suggestions sincerely welcome; I don't expect any, I've been largely content to talk into a void & about books most of the time, and advice for coping with loss of a parent is impossible to give but especially to a somewhat-stranger online! but in this one particular, suggestions for easy and frivolous sources of joy would be fantastic)

TBH putting energy into just the brainstorming is probably productive, despite my general disinclination towards preemptive investment. It's hard to tell, given that I'm so profoundly crazy, that I have so many & such productive coping mechanisms. "Distraction" is a double-edged coping mechanism—it's so often a way of not-coping, instead of providing space to cope, and has attendant problems like addiction/depersonalization. But what I'm facing is so awful that I'm not worried about negative side-effects; any problems that arise from my attempts to cope can only be smaller than the problems I'm facing; there is nothing bigger than this. Wasting time brainstorming ways to be happy? Still productive, if I am for the moment less sad.

The hardest work I need to do is to balance that against going home, being there; being uncomfortable and maybe sad there, being reminded—I do need to inhabit this as it happens, for my sake and my family's sake and my dad's sake, and because it doesn't go away if I don't go home. All I'll do is miss the time we have left.

Absolutely am going to hem my new PJ pants/buy some new lounge pants. I don't need to be presentable and outward-facing when I go home, especially not if I'm doing it for longer lengths of time. I just need to be there.

Title: Infidel (Bel Dame Apocrypha Book 2)
Author: Kameron Hurley
Published: Night Shade Books, 2011
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 360
Total Page Count: 235,055
Text Number: 749
Read Because: continuing the series as per this recommendation, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Six years after the first book, Nyx becomes embroiled in rogue Bel Dame conspiracies against the monarchy. This is better paced and plotted than the more rambling God's War, which makes it possible to sit back and enjoy the strengths of this series--enjoy isn't the right word in such an inhospitable world with such a thorny cast, but these brutal women, Nyx and especially the returning Inaya, are a liberation: unapologetically flawed, difficult women with significant character arcs. There are too many reoccurring characters, and it's only that so many people died in the first book that it doesn't feel implausible; that, combined with the emphasis on reuniting/dispersing the band, especially the delineated denouement/resolution, makes for the weakest part of the book: hokey, predictable pacing. The craft here remains rough around the edges, but there's intrinsic value in this world and it's easier to appreciate here than in the first book; it's worth reading for those that have started the series.


Title: The Madman's Daughter (The Madman's Daughter Book 1)
Author: Megan Shepherd
Narrator: Lucy Rayner
Published: Balzer + Bray, 2013
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 405
Total Page Count: 235,460
Text Number: 750
Read Because: reading more from the author, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Juliet Moreau, destitute after the scandal that led to her father's disappearance, discovers that he's alive and practicing science on a remote island. The Island of Dr. Moreau is an interesting pick for adaptation; it's part of the public consciousness, but details like PoV and supporting characters are not, which make them unremarkable fodder for commentary. But the themes benefit from room to expand, and they're not more complex but are forefronted and humanized. This also delights in the source material's gothic/action-adventure elements, and feels a bit like a younger sibling to Penny Dreadful, a similar aesthetic excess, perhaps more indulgent than successful (with some exceptions, like the dream of the iron dress). But this is a YA novel, with a love triangle that is not just obligatory but oppressive, interrupting plot and overshadowing the suspense. It made me find swathes of this book unbearably tedious, and as it's a predominant aspect of the sequels I have no desire to read them. An interesting effort, a fun combination of influences, but so hamstrung by genre conventions that I can't recommend it.


Title: The Magicians (The Magicians Book 1)
Author: Lev Grossman
Published: Plume Books, 2009
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 465
Total Page Count: 235,925
Text Number: 751
Read Because: co-read with Teja, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: An over-performing college applicant discovers that magic is real and he's invited to attend a school for magicians. A school with pedagogy that's somehow even worse than Harry Potter, but which does invoke a sense of longing. It has tendencies towards The Secret History, which would justify its pretentiousness, but misses the mark: characters and their relationships are insufficiently engaging. The book's final third is its most challenging and least successful, with uneven pacing and a truly awful end.

Whether this book works may hinge on its commentary of portal fantasies. It engages some tropes and images which are close to my heart, and there's room to age up the trope; but I don't know that this succeeds. For one, it overlooks the ways in which Narnia in particular is already a complex narrative, possessing sincere character growth and magic. For another: Quentin. He's is an intentional, contentious choice for protagonist, and the conflict between his search for something greater and his self-imposed misery makes for a confrontational reader stand-in as well as a foil to portal fantasies. The idea has merit, but the truth is that he's insufferable and I would rather any other PoV; he controverts the imagery, the tone, the magic, with insufficient character growth to justify it. I found myself in constant dialog--often argument--with The Magicians; I care about what it cares about, and it certainly kept me engaged. But I wouldn't call it successful, and I'm ambivalent about reading the sequels.

(As of writing, Teja hasn't finished this. He's sensitive to this variety of over-achieving miserable failure of a manchild character type, and so many never finish it, we will see. I did yell at him about it, as memorialized on Tumblr; I think we have pretty consistent feelings, except I'm less invested in Quentin's worth/narrative function and more invested in what exactly Grossman is trying? failing? to say about magical schools and portal fantasies and the link between fantasy and character growth. A weird buddy read—most of my reactions to his picks are "dudes, god, why," and this is extra bonus doubled-down on the "god, why dudes," but with a level of intent, however misguided, that means I was actually more engaged than normal, albeit not always with any particular joy.)

( Memorialized on Tumblr: a crosspost. )

Title: When You Reach Me
Author: Rebecca Stead
Published: Wendy Lamb Books, 2009
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 200
Total Page Count: 228,390
Text Number: 729
Read Because: mentioned by ambyr, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:
The mundane events in a girl's life are knit together by her favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time. Stead has a fantastic eye for mundanity, the daily details, for building immersion and character growth. The larger plot is surprisingly simplistic, especially in retrospect: it's just one twist, which isn't foreshadowed so much as it is the book's core structure. An interesting combination of elements, but one that didn't gel for me. The function of—and therefore allusions and comparisons to—A Wrinkle in Time highlights my disappointment: this has little of that sense of wonder and whimsy, and where the details of A Wrinkle in Time provide necessary grounding, the speculative concept here is relatively decentralized and thus the details aren't providing balance. It's an unfair comparison, since I have a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in A Wrinkle in Time—but it's one that this book invites, so.... I loved some of the moments in this (particularly the protagonist's female friendships and feelings towards her mother), but never loved the book entire.


Title: The Handmaid's Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Published: Anchor Books, 1998 (1985)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 228,710
Text Number: 729
Read Because: co-read with Teja, from my personal library
Review: Reread August 2017: My earlier impression holds up. I enjoy Atwood's voice, although the wordplay and literary styling, while fluid and beautiful and personal, also become repetitive; more, it distracts from the dystopic/speculative worldbuilding: it's iconic, with the costumes and proper names and near-future dystopic styling, and I can see why it's stuck in the public imagination, but it's not awfully convincing (especially in origin). The commentary re: women's social roles and the complicity of "good" men is much more successful. The climax is rushed, but I like the use of the frame narrative/final chapter for contextualizing the story.

This reminds me of Elgin's Native Tongue, which I also think isn't entirely successful but which I think does more with similar themes, in large part because the women's underground society/cooperation in defiance of male dismissal and socially-enforced competition comes often, and early, and has huge impact on the plot; here, not so much.

( Co-reading notes. )


Title: Before I Fall
Author: Lauren Oliver
Narrator: Sarah Drew
Published: HarperCollins, 2010
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 200 of 415
Total Page Count: 228,910
Text Number: 730
Read Because: this review, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: When a teenage girl dies after a party, she returns to relive the last day of her life. DNF at 50%. This has a speculative plot structure but is entirely contemporary in execution—the story of a high school mean girl coming to terms with the origins and consequences of her actions. It has an atmosphere entirely alien to my high school experience, petty and drunken, and exacerbated by the tone used for character voices in the audio narration—but perfect balanced between the social dramas and facile but resonant moments of profundity which do feel uniquely teenage. The groundhog day format makes for an exhaustively detailed, grindingly mundane exploration of this amped up high school life; I hated it, but suspect fans of contemporary YA would have better luck. This is the wrong book for me, and I'm glad to drop it; spoilers for the ending haven't changed my mind.

Title: Trouble and Her Friends
Author: Melissa Scott
Published: Lethe Press, 2014 (1994)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 380
Total Page Count: 224,650
Text Number: 714
Read Because: co-read with Teja, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Three years after their work is officially criminalized, two semi-retired hackers re-enter the field in pursuit of a copycat. Scott works hard to invert established cyberpunk standards, decentralizing and localizing the setting, shifting the focus to queer women, and looking at the intersection of stigmatized bodies and transhumanism; the intent is admirable and occasionally provoking—most successfully, when considering which technologies are standardized on the basis of which groups use them. But too often these concepts are left underexplored. They're buried under a rambling plot and excess of supporting characters, and Scott's image of the future hasn't aged well (less well, even, than older cyberpunk novels): the synesthesic view the protagonists have of online space is evocative but restrained, and the rest of the virtual world is simplistic and too small. I wanted to love this and it disappointed me. But I'm glad that it exists, glad to see the genre pointedly diversified in logical ways; privilege, society, and bodies have always had an important role in cyberpunk; I'd rather Scott bring up the issue and fail to wrap a successful book around it than to not have it come up at all.

(Teja and I had approximately similar reactions, although he was more critical of plot—and rightly so: there's a general sense of disconnect between plot and genre; the brainworm is the means by which they make things happen, but largely feels like a McGuffin, and the opening to tie it into character motivation is spoiled by an inconsistent, uninteresting antagonist—and less interested in the (largely unrealized) potential of queering a cyberpunk narrative. It's weird that a book so actively engaged in writing about its genre has so little follow-through in that regard, but I'm willing to extend a lot of good will on basis of the intent alone. On the other hand, at least that debate—about whether or not it achieves cyberpunk, about whether or not it achieves its aims—is interesting! more interesting than, "ah yes, another vaguely unsuccessful book by a white man." I remain Team Slightly-Diversified-Buddy-Reads.)

( Quote & further thoughts re: marginalized cyberpunk. )


Title: The Other Log of Phileas Fogg
Author: Philip José Farmer
Published: London: Titan Books, 2012 (1973)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 45 of 305
Total Page Count: 224,695
Text Number: 715
Read Because: cleaning out my bookshelves, used paperback purchased from Corvallis Public Library book sale
Review: DNF at ~10%. The short, punchy chapter length and playful tone means I could finish this if I wanted to; the retelling format is tedious, which means I don't want to. I feel confident about giving this a pass, but it may be worthwhile to readers more invested in the source material or premise.


Title: Stargate
Author: Pauline Gedge
Published: New York: The Dial Press, 1982
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 340
Total Page Count: 225,035
Text Number: 716
Read Because: personal enjoyment, library discard hardback purchased from Corvallis Public Library book sale
Review: After the Worldmaker becomes the Unmaker, a vast family of linked stars and guardian sun-lords fall one by one. This is a loss of innocence narrative on a literally universal scale, a uniquely massive premise with a pervasive sense of inevitability; it strips autonomy from its characters and prohibits investment on the individual level, to its detriment: it's distant, bitter, inaccessible. The imagery is diverse and beautiful, but there's so much that it becomes monotonous. But while this isn't successful, and I don't recommend it, there's a seed of potential within—I've rarely encountered a narrative so stubbornly vast, so willing to refuse the human element and conceivable scale.

Title: ZOO
Author: Otsuichi
Translator: Terry Gallagher
Published: San Francisco: Haikusoru, 2006
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 218,975
Text Number: 693
Read Because: reread for review purposes, from my personal library
Review: Eleven stories which consistently establish Otuichi's common narrative techniques, themes, and tone. His premises are frequently high-concept, sometimes to the extent of thought experiment (exacerbated here by the workman-like translation) and he has a penchant for unreliable narration and a twist in the denouement, which works more often than not—sometimes purely as narrative payoff, but at best these tricks are inextricably tied to the story's themes and character growth, as in "Song of the Sunny Spot." He writes about outsiders, about flawed and abusive interpersonal dynamics; his tone is morbid and, especially here, darkly humorous. I prefer the morbidity (as in the short, creepy "In the Park") to the humor, which can be caricatured or simply off-putting; these characters are frequently awful and unlikable, which keeps me at a distance from this collection especially when compared to the more cerebral Goth or more emotional Calling You. That makes ZOO my least favorite publication from one of my favorite authors—it lacks the profound appeal I find in his other work, but it's consistently satisfying and provides the style and content I look for from Otuichi.


Title: 1Q84
Author: Haruki Murakami
Translator: Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel
Published: Knopf, 2011 (2009)
Rating: 1 of 5
Page Count: 200 of 1040
Total Page Count: 219,175
Text Number: 694
Read Because: co-read with Teja, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: DNF at ~20%, which was about 200 pages, and as such a sign that my time is more valuable than this book. Murakami possesses an almost hypnotic style, offering surprising flow despite the length and relative mundanity of individual scenes—but this is nonetheless unforgivably long and overwritten (contrasting hilariously with scenes where Tengo obsessively rewrites and edits Air Chrysalis to stubborn perfection—a punishing attention to detail which seems entirely absent in 1Q84). The narrative is slow and padded by graceless infodumping that defies suspension of disbelief; the characters are caricatured, the dialog stiff; a distasteful veil of misogyny shades depictions of female characters and gendered violence such that they're tasteless at best, problematic at worst. This wasn't for me, and doesn't compel me to try any of Murakami's other novels; I don't recommend it.


Title: Stories of Your Life and Others
Author: Ted Chiang
Published: Small Beer Press, 2010 (2002)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 280
Total Page Count: 219,455
Text Number: 695
Read Because: multiple recommendations/having watched Arrival, the film adaptation of "Story of Your Life," ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A collection of only eight stories, many of them on the longer side. It's an idea-based collection; the stories feel like thought experiments and the narrative voices are comparatively understated, even absent. This works best when the concepts are particularly strong, like the evocative, surreal, science fictional take on "Tower of Babylon," or the plot developments are particularly substantial, as in the narrative evolution of "Story of your Life;" elsewise, they can come across as distant or even didactic. But even the second-rate stories are engaging; the concepts may be one-note or implausible, but the explorations of them are expansive. I didn't love this—I find I want a stronger voice, or maybe some characterization—but I consistently enjoyed it; it's substantial, intelligent, and satisfies that high-concept speculative fiction itch.

Title: The Female Man
Author: Joanna Russ
Published: Boston: Beacon Press, 2000 (1975)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 215
Total Page Count: 213,600
Text Number: 673
Read Because: personal enjoyment, paperback given to me by thobari
Review: Four women are brought together across four parallel worlds. One comes from a futuristic single-sex utopia, one comes from a modern setting stuck in the Great Depression, and Russ plays fast and loose with plot and swings between PoVs, settings, and forms of address without feeling any obligation to explain; it's disorientating and almost playful, but for the frequently joyless theme. This is a speculative exploration of the way that women are influenced by their societies, and while Russ's feminism encompasses Feminism 101 it also exceeds it (as example, interrogating the link between internalized misogyny and gender dysphoria) and, with precious few exceptions, doesn't feel dated, although it isn't particularly intersectional. It's angry and dispiriting, but never has that frustrating sense of redundancy that marks some explicitly feminists novels. Not, by any means, a fun read; perhaps not anything I hadn't realized; but this was fundamental, in a way: that self-critical, self-deprecatory, rageful, playful, compassionate view of women—and the female self—as they are, or could be.


Title: Little Brother (Little Brother Book 1)
Author: Cory Doctorow
Narrator: Kirby Heyborne
Published: Listening Library, 2008
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 390
Total Page Count: 213,990
Text Number: 674
Read Because: co-read with Teja, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: After a terrorist attack, San Francisco becomes a police state—and one teenage boy rises up to fight it. This is fueled by a lot of righteous anger about the intersection of privacy, technology, and politics; it's well-intended and, sadly, as relevant now as in a Bush-era presidency. And that's the only thing to recommend it, because, as a book, it's pretty awful. The teenage male PoV is uninspired, which makes the romance doubly so; there's a minimum of intersectional awareness in the supporting cast, but it's undermined by the use of slurs. Doctorow's tendency towards infodumping makes every character sound the same—namely, like Wikipedia article given a veneer of hipness—and the name- and brand-dropping and frequent geek cred are cringe-inducing. The plot, somewhere under that, isn't awful, and I sympathize with Doctorow in spirit if not specifics—but this is an awful reading experience and I can't recommend it.

(A co-read with Teja, on his suggestion, as part of his 1984 block—and while I loved revisiting 1984, this was pretty awful. It's transparent propaganda directed at teenagers: Boys! Create Civil Liberties on Your Internet!—I don't know that Doctorow was intentionally targeting teenage boys but does he ever, and this is where Teja and I differ: neither of us enjoyed it now, but he says he would have found it an effective call to action at the time/at that age, as he was part of the intended audience, sympathetic to teenage boy experiences and computer-savvy enough to find the privacy technology here explored intriguing; I think I would have bounced off of it, mostly because I would have found the PoV isolating and vaguely icky (and also because I wanted my calls to action to be intellectual instead of cool—I was a pretentious teen). It feels unfair to judge it outside of context, when it's all just info dumping and YA characterization and excessive cringy geek cred but, mostly, not for me. But even in context? It still wasn't for me, it was never for me.)


Title: The Book of Phoenix (Who Fears Death Book 0.1)
Author: Nnedi Okorafor
Published: DAW, 2015
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 235
Total Page Count: 214,225
Text Number: 675
Read Because: reading more of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: After the death of a friend, a manufactured, genetically modified superhuman escapes the Tower that created her and sets out to destroy it. The components elements of this dystopia origin story are fascinating: Phoenix's gendered and racially motivated rage, the commentary on technology and social responsibility and ethics, the manufacture of a villain and how future generations reinterpret her legacy. But I bounced off of the voice—unexpectedly, as I've enjoyed Okorafor's writing elsewhere. The first person narrative lacks structure, wandering between settings and events in such a way as to obfuscate foreshadowing and to make Phoenix appear to lack either direction or reliable narration. The editing is wanting (numerous missing vocative commas, as example), and the descriptions are distant and repetitive despite the colorful speculative elements and their strong symbolism. All that said, I tend to have a difficult time with first person narratives, so this may have simply been a bad fit for me. But I tried hard to love it, and appreciate it conceptually, yet never became invested; I don't recommend it.

Title: Anathem
Author: Neal Stephenson
Published: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 955
Total Page Count: 213,570
Text Number: 649
Read Because: co-read with Teja, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Off-world influence forever alters life for the citizens of Arbre and its math-based monastic order. Math-as-philosophy/-as-speculative-concept/-as-worldbuilding is unique and engaging, and kudos to Stephenson for also making it accessible. There's an attempt to balance the math-heavy sections with daily detail, but these details are boring and there's a sincere dearth of interesting characters or interactions (or women); the worldbuilding is clumsy, especially the use of language, and I don't entirely buy the plot (in particular, the importance of human consciousness). A book this long and obnoxiously dense needs to be a virtuoso work. This isn't. Dump the first 50 pages and the middle action sequences, trim it to about 400 pages, and there's some clever concepts worth exploring. But as it is, it's in no ways enjoyable, nor worth the effort.


Title: China Mountain Zhang
Author: Maureen F. McHugh
Published: Orb Books, 1997 (1992)
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 315
Total Page Count: 213,885
Text Number: 650
Read Because: recommended by Kalanadi, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: After Chinese-headed socialism has become the leading world power, "Government is big, we are small. We are only free when we slip through the cracks." This is a local, personal-scale novel about individuals surviving within a larger political and social climate that's not quite a dystopia. It can be awful to read, occasionally in predictable or problematic-adjacent ways, and requires trigger warnings for rape and queer suicide. But neither is it tragedy porn; there's mundanity and profundity, too, and an emphasis on sanctuaries and the personal narratives that persist in any setting. The stories of the ensemble cast overlap, but not too neatly; not every section is equally strong, but there's a surprising amount of flow. Worldbuilding is secondary to these aspects without being coy. This is a quiet, unassuming book, and a sincere success.


Title: When the Moon Was Ours
Author: Anna-Marie McLemore
Published: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 214,175
Text Number: 651
Read Because: recommended by literarymagpie, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Miel and Sam have been friends ever since she was found in a water tower as a child; now adolescents, their coming of age is sparked by Miel's magical curse, Sam's gender identity, and their burgeoning romance. There's a lean towards the delineated and repetitive in the imagery and character growth—a larger cast or more precise sense of place may have made the work broader and the themes less blatant. But it's all so fundamentally good as to overcome that weakness. The pumpkins and moons, the descriptions of food and color and scent, are lush and beautiful without slipping into pure purple prose. Everything about Sam's gender is handled with grace and respect,* and the cultural and racial diversity, exploration of women's power, depictions of racism and appropriation and self-presentation, are well-interrogated and complex while still providing a positive, productive resolution. This is a profoundly beautiful book, in style—which is best delivered in bite-sizes, which the chapter length encourages—as well as content. I recommend it.

* Miel's trauma isn't as successfully portrayed—while Sam's identity feels like a lived experience, Miel's history feels more metaphorical, to its detriment.


Anathem was Teja's suggestion, part of a list of books he brought with him while traveling, the only book he ended up getting to because of its grinding length; I power-read it for the sake of being done with it, and then ignored the rest of his SF-by-dudes TBR to read three books—two of them reviewed above—that were by/about women and/or PoC and which I knew would have a localized focus on actual characters and/or beautiful, intentional language. Those were not the fundamental flaws of Anathem—that would be worldbuilding and pacing—but they were the ones I most desperately needed to counteract.

And those three books were, independently, quite good; and they felt bonus extra good for the fact that almost anything with any competency would have at that point seemed amazing.