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finished reading kallocain during lunch, it has such luscious sentences

it feels like a poem wearing the guise of a novel. the first time i tried to read it, i read like i would any other novel. but for me, it only revealed itself, and was frankly only understandable, when taking the pace down a few notches

i don't know what translation keeps the dreamy poetry of its sentences intact; you could always learn swedish

This is one of those 5/5 ratings where I don't think the book is perfect, but it gets it because it is so intensely targeted at my own interests and I'm so grateful to have read it. Some bullet points to entice you:

• anti-capitalism, anti-cop
• train heists
• found family vibes
• first person point of view with an internalized narration to a second person "you"
• fantasy religions that don't feel like direct analogies of real ones
• revenge plot and revolutionaries
• gaaaaaaay

The book is so unapologetically queer and kinky, it's great. The author credits Stone Butch Blues (among many other things) in the end notes, which feels entirely unsurprising. The gender-y and queer bits also both intersect with the in-world religions in realistic ways.

It's a book that desperately needs a map; there's a pile of countries, religions, and politics especially when it hits the Chauncey estate section. The book does a good job of keeping it all ~~straight~~ queerly differentiated but the world has so much texture--it's a ttrpg campaign setting crying out for illustration! It also feels like a living world; characters having a life both off-page and outside of the protagonist make it feel even more real.

The book opens with a labor dispute and police violence and sworn revenge, but from there it doesn't shy away from critiques of power and incrementalism and reformers. There's some wild rich people monologues where they unintentionally bare themselves as soulless vampires. There's a bandit charade of a hidden equitable country, pretending to be part of a baronial system.

Sunlight licked between bruisy limestone smokestacks and telegraphy spires, and the crumbling knuckled colonnades of an empire that's long gone.

I found the writing to be a delight: the narrator is at times unreliable, and the writing is full of dreamy metaphors. At times, somebody will bust out with a multi-page exposition about religion, or a set of introductions to a full dramatis personae worth of baronets. The final lap of the book has its own tonal shift that I won't get into for reasons. Somehow this all held together for me; maybe it's that none of these parts overstayed their welcome. I'm sure some folks will bounce off of this writing style, but I'm not folks, that's for sure.

Being a Hereafterist is a commitment to creating a brand-new world all the time. It is the method of making a new world, it does not stop, we are never there yet. We have never arrived at a restful Hereafter, we must keep making. We will become a liberated collective, a plague will roll over us, and a famine, and fifty thousand bullets, and we will need to make choices. We will need to change. We must resist the ossification of precedent. We march toward Hereafter, not tomorrow, we march past tomorrow, we know tomorrow will be hard.

In the end, this is a fuck yeah revenge story about disaster queers fighting capitalism with violence. It's less about answers or even hope, and more about conveying a sense of angry determinism working for a future none of them will see.

Delves into the many varied & amazing ways humans & animals have evolved to depend upon microbes. Most of this was familiar to me already, though told in the author's excellent clear & awed way. New was the incredible nesting of microbes within high-order animal cells, with each doing distinct jobs, such that none can survive without the others. Yong is always good for a celebration of life & its complexity.

This was one of those books that when it ended, I missed getting to be in the world. It has a kind of understated, slice-of-life feel, with a lot of detail and reverence paid to the minutia of daily life and community relationships, that felt more prominent to me than the murder mysteries. Addison writes with an immense amout of compassion and tenderness, and for me that is what makes this book, and The Goblin Emperor, transcend what they would be on their face, in terms of plot.

The writing style drops you into the cultural nuances of the society largely without explanation, and you can infer, for example, what different honorifics mean through context. I really really like this and I think overall its very well done, but I think it would be more daunting if I hadn't already read The Goblin Emperor, and there were some points at which I needed a little help. Specifically, I found the sexual mores confusing, and it was important to the plot that they make sense.

I would highly recommend this if you read and liked The Goblin Emperor, but I'd be more cautious to recommend it if you haven't, even though it's not a sequel per say.

I kind of have two reviews of this book. On the one hand, I now understand why it's a classic. Twain was a great observer of his peers and an even better writer. It's not a book for kids, at least not contemporary ones, but setting aside the things I'm about to complain about it's a great read about childhood for adults.

On the other, it's also very clear to me why many people don't want to read this book and particularly want it taken out of curricula. It's not just the N-word, though that's all over the place. Personally I was much more troubled by the attitudes through the book.

The worst part by far is Twain's treatment of the one indigenous character, "Injun Joe". The story needs an antagonist, and the cartoonishness of Joe and his crimes seem like an OK fit. But why make him indigenous at all? His indigeneity is irrelevant to the plot but Twain is literally incapable of mentioning him with explicitly flagging it. I realised towards the end of the book that this is a direct counterpart to the antisemitism in Dorian Gray, which I found such a slap in the face that I couldn't finish the story. I don't think it says anything particularly good about me that I could hold my nose and keep reading when it was less personal, but that's also not very surprising. In any case, I would rate this as the primary reason to keep the book off syllabi, and I can certainly understand anyone refusing to finish it once the treatment of this character becomes clear.

By comparison to that disgusting benchmark, Twain's treatment of Black characters seems slightly less bad, in that: there's more than one, they aren't interchangeable, their Blackness is relevant to the roles they get to play in the story, and he puts some positive words about at least one of them in a character's (Huck's) mouth. But even that last is tempered: Huck seems proud to treat the Black man who gives him food and board less badly than other white people do, but it's very explicitly a concession that Huck will share a table with him. All of which, and the liberal use of the N-word in dialogue, seem realistic for how this set of white people would have talked about Black folk in their town, but it still makes for hard reading today.

And even the way Twain approaches the white characters of the town is somewhat condescending. He's a good enough observer that it's clear he's talking about the sort of place he grew up in, but he also seems very keen to separate himself from it, like he's better for having got out, not just luckier. This is a much smaller flaw in the book, but it did grate at times, and that sort of superiority probably reinforces the racism showing through elsewhere.

Unlike the super-high-tech far future of her Wayfarers series, Chambers focuses on just the near-future of the human race. Seen from a team of exoplanet explorers surveying alien life, To Be Taught paints a future where governments fail in the mission to space but the human spirit leads ordinary people to crowdfund the mission instead. And when the interstellar mission outlasts human lifespans, government lifespans and even societal lifespans, Chambers leaves us with a deeply personal question, ask from both her perspective and that of the protagonist, chronologically ancient, barely human and too distant to ever return home: how much is space exploration worth?