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February 2026

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
[personal profile] marycatelli posting in [community profile] book_love
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 14 by Kanehito Yamada

Spoilers ahead for the earlier ones.

Read more... )
Feb. 18th, 2026 06:36 pm

i have scaled these city walls

musesfool: Sokka! (browsing the boomerang collection)
[personal profile] musesfool
Some things make a post, right?

1. I had the dentist today, so I took the day off, because I am always so exhausted when I come back from the dentist. It's rarely bad, but trying to breathe through the cleaning is always an adventure I do not enjoy and it makes me tired. But I told them that the crown I got in December is mostly fine except if I try to eat almonds or other hard things, so the dentist did something to it "fix the bite." He also said it didn't look like anything was wrong either in the examination or on the x-ray, and to let him know if it didn't get better (or even got worse), so I guess we'll see.

1a. I arrived about 30 minutes early for my appointment - it usually takes much longer to get there so I allowed an hour - but they took me in right away since I was only scheduled to be there for a cleaning, and I was home before noon.

B. I was excited to see ZIBANEJAD score the tying goal for Sweden, but then Quinn Hughes won it for the US in overtime. I have to admit, I don't like 3-on-3 overtime (or shootouts!) for the Olympics. Just play another sudden death period.

iii. This past weekend, Baby Miss L went to her first princess tea party event at the Riverhead aquarium (or near there?) and the pictures of her holding court among the princesses are amazing, but my favorite picture is the one of her making a very excited "oh wow!" face at the plate of desserts in front of her. She was ready to dig in!

d. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band are coming to MSG in May!!! Tickets go on sale this weekend! I will probably not try to get them, even though MSG is pretty much the 2nd most convenient venue he could play. (Forest Hills Stadium would be the most convenient for me, but would never happen.)

5. I've reached The Butcher's Masquerade in my DCC reread, and I think it might be my favorite of the books? It has a couple of my favorite scenes in it, anyway, including spoilers ) I definitely prefer the more open-world type floors than the stuff like the Iron Tangle (and I did find the cards so fucking tedious in book 6; otoh, spoilers )).

Though This Inevitable Ruin is also a strong contender, since I fucking love spoilers ) There's a lot in it that I enjoyed and that also makes me so curious about what happens next, both in the dungeon and outside of it. I am definitely writing up an epic post based on notes I'm taking on rereading, which will eventually get posted. I hope. *g*

*
Feb. 19th, 2026 11:24 am

Books read, January

cyphomandra: (balcony)
[personal profile] cyphomandra
The War that Saved My Life was my favourite this month - I liked bits of the others but nothing that was entirely successful for me.

The war that saved my life, Kimberley Brubaker Bradley (re-read).
Havoc, Rebecca Wait.
Tragedy at Pike River Mine, Rebecca Macfie.
Heels over head, Elyse Springer.
The death of us, Abigail Dean.
Cinder house, Freya Maske.
Billy Summers, Stephen King
Every step she takes, Alison Cochrun.


The war that saved my life, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. Locked away and abused by her evil mother for having a club foot, Ada’s chance for an actual life comes when her brother and his friends are evacuated to the countryside in the early days of WWII and she manages to go with them. They’re placed (reluctantly) with Susan, who is grieving the death of her female lover, and basically this remains an intensely satisfying recovery/family-building/humanising story, with horses.

Havoc, Rebecca Wait. Teenage Ida flees her and her mother’s disgrace (I think they’re in the Shetlands or the Hebrides, so lots of small-town social ostracism) by organising her own scholarship to an eccentric, failing, English girls’ boarding school (in the 1980s, which I feel I should specify given my fondness for elderly boarding school stories); but her new room mate is an arsonist, a new teacher is lying about his past, and there’s a strange epidemic of compulsive twitching and seizures slowly spreading through the school… This is black comedy, readable and well-written, and I like the girls’ plot lines. I wasn’t that thrilled about the bits from the staff povs and I did feel the denouement was lacking in punch, but I liked it.

Tragedy at Pike River Mine, Rebecca Macfie. I took my mother to see the Pike River movie, about the disaster that killed 29 miners, and got curious about some of the background; this book goes through the many, many terrible decisions made by the people who built the mine in the first place (“We’re going to be cheaper and more efficient because we’ve never built a mine before so we’re not hampered by pre-conceived ideas” was basically their approach, with a lot of doubling-down when anything went wrong - the coal-cutting machines, for example, couldn’t handle the slope and broke down multiple times per shift, but although more reliable replacements were available management were convinced that it was just the miners complaining) and the cover-up in the immediate aftermath of the disaster (I hadn’t really followed this as the original explosion was between the September and February Chch earthquakes). The movie focuses on the friendship between two women who lost men in the mine (one her husband, one her son - her other son was one of the two survivors who were able to get out after the first explosion), played by Robyn Malcom and Melanie Lynskey, both excellent as always; it does end on a surprisingly upbeat note and yet the whole thing is still dragging on legally even now (the book keeps getting updated). Thorough, but not overwhelming.

Heels Over Head, Elyse Springer. Jeremy is on track to compete in diving at the Olympics and has no time for anything or anyone else, not least the new raw talent tattooed and publicly out diver Brandon, whom Jeremy’s coach has just offered to train. They fall in love, Jeremy’s homophobic redneck family say horrible things, Jeremy & Brandon are stunning at pairs diving, Brandon quietly makes himself homeless when he doesn’t want to bother anyone about why funding hasn’t come through, Jeremy works himself up over the Olympics and feels he has to break up with Brandon etc etc. I did like quite a bit of this but Jeremy is hard work and Brandon is two-dimensional. The diving is fun? But the book ends a day or so before the Olympics themselves, which does leave one hanging.

The Death of Us, Abigail Dean. I read and didn’t much like Dean’s Girl A, in which Girl A escapes a House of Horrors (quasi religious abusive large family) only to end up having to confront her past when her jailed mother dies and leaves her the house. I liked this a bit more but I don’t think I’d read another of hers. Isabelle and Edward meet, fall in love, and make a life together - a life which is torn apart violently when they become the victims of a serial rapist (and murderer), the South London Invader. Years afterwards, the Invader is caught - Isabelle and Edward, now long separated, meet up again at court and start to work through what went wrong.

Cinder House, Freya Marske. Cinderella retelling that starts with Ella’s death, as she tumbles down the stairs of her house and becomes its ghost, bound to its physical form. Her stepmother and stepsisters learn that they can force Ella to do household chores by threatening the house, but then Ella makes a bargain with a fairy charm-seller that earns her three nights, no more, where she can leave the house, and be part of the living world again… The ghost/house bits are great and I also liked Ella, but this is pitched as queer and while Ella is bi, the grand central romance is still Ella/male prince, so I can understand the annoyance on GoodReads.

Billy Summers, Stephen King. Billy was a (US) sniper in Iraq. Now he kills for money - only bad guys - and he’s just taken one last job, which involves going under cover in a small town where he will live in a quiet suburban house and spend each day sitting in an office (with a convenient view of a key building), writing his memoir. Billy takes pains to ensure people think he’s a lot stupider than he actually is, to fly under the radar, but the process of writing his memoir is forcing him confront his real identity; and then he endangers his cover by rescuing a young woman who’s been drugged, gang-raped and dumped on the roadside. This is solid King as crime-writer (although every so often there’s a mention of the Shining, as the characters take to the relevant mountains), and I always enjoy his pacing. Billy’s relationship with Alice doesn’t always work for me (and surely she has some other friends, even if she’s estranged from her family?).

Every step she takes, Alison Cochrun. Overly responsible Sadie gets the chance to escape her family business responsibilities when her sister, a travel blogger, is unable to walk the Camino de Santiago due to injury. Turbulence on the flight over leads to Sadie coming out to the hot queer woman sitting next to her, convinced that she is about to die without ever really grappling with her own sexual identity, but then they don’t crash, her sister has failed to tell Sadie the tour is explicitly queer, and the hot queer woman, Mal, is also on it. Mal offers to be Sadie’s hot gay mentor EVEN though she’s secretly attracted to Sadie and I’m sure you can see exactly where this is going (the “I’ve never kissed a woman, show me” is okay but by the time Sadie was ordering Mal to have sex with her because otherwise she never would I was having significant boundary issues). I don’t know why Cochrun consistently writes characters with the emotional maturity of teenagers (Sadie is supposed to be 35) but in many ways this would have worked much better for me if they’d been early 20s at most and also if Mal wasn’t secretly the incredibly rich heir to a Portuguese winery empire. I did like bits of it and I did have to have a pastel de nata (okay, two) from the local Portuguese tart makers after reading, but I do wonder whether I should keep trying with Cochrun.
muccamukk: Jan flying. Text: "Watch out where you swing that hammer, Golden Boy! There's a lady present!" (Marvel: Feminism)
[personal profile] muccamukk
I'm putting together a presentation for school on the misogyny slop ecosystem, and how PR companies astroturf a hate campaign to defame and discredit (usually female) people their employer doesn't like. Here's some links I might include in that, some of which I've posted here before. Taken together, they're chilling.

Posted in roughly the order they came across my line of sight, which is largely chronological.

✨: Probably going to include in the project. (A lot of the later links are just recent stuff I haven't included yet, which may be of interest to those following the case.)

Eight Links with quote decks. Includes references to Epstein, but no details. )

I'm still looking for something short that clearly lays out the way information is fed to influencers. It's a common misconception that whoever's running the smear will pay the influencers, and sometimes that's the case, but it's not usually how shilling works. The influencers take the exclusive information, publish it, potentially get their post boosted by the PR company's bots, and then the payment shows up in the ad revenue. (It's explained in "Who Trolled Amber?", but that's too long.)
Feb. 18th, 2026 11:15 am

zoo story

nineweaving: (Default)
[personal profile] nineweaving
[personal profile] rushthatspeaks and I took a delighted young Fox to the Stone Zoo for a much-belated Christmas present. (The Antarctic weather we've had would have daunted all but the hardiest animals, let alone us.)

Some of the denizens, of course, revelled in the snow.

The Arctic fox was snug and smug.



The snow leopard was serenely aloof.



Wolves on the horizon! Shades of Willoughby Chase.




The colobus monkeys have a mischievous toddler. Its parents clearly told its older sibling to babysit, and the brat kept teasing and tigging and dive bombing the poor guy from the ceiling.



Fennec fox. Those ears!



The orangest flamingos!



Red panda.




I didn't get pictures of the bats or the bears, and the otters stayed snug in their grotto, over hot chocolate and Monopoly. They must play something.

Nine
Feb. 18th, 2026 07:18 am

Ash Wednesday

ladyjax: (Default)
[personal profile] ladyjax
One of the downsides of working from home (also not having a car but that's more about convenience in this particular case) is that getting to church for Ash Wednesday is more of a struggle for me.  When I still went into my office, I could take a longer lunch and go up to the church closest to me for the noontime service.  Last year, I was able to go since it was on the way home from a training and figured at the very least I could get ashes on the corner if I didn't make the service over at St. Paul's.  As luck would have it, I made the service.  I don't go to church regularly much anymore but St. Paul's is a good place to go when I do.

This year, my time is stacked because I've to to leave work early for something else and I didn't necessarily want to take the whole day off. I did do the readings for the day, which conveniently come in email (yay, technology).  Also, I have chosen a saint for Lent Madness - this is new for me but hey, having saints duking it out in a March Madness style bracket cracks me up. I am pulling for Marina the Monk, who wanted to join a monastary rather than get married (her dad was going to marry her off and join a monastary himself and she said nope, let's be monks together) and dressed as a a young man to join up.I was previously unfamiliar with her story but the Episcopal Church added her to the liturgical calendar in 2022. She's been long venerated in Easter Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox Churches. 

I love saint stories.  They start out pretty tame but then you run into something like, "Oh, by the way, there was that thing with the snakes and it was pretty amazing."

cimorene: Blue willow branches on a peach ground (rococo)
[personal profile] cimorene
I need to hand wash a bunch of wool things. Three sweaters with soot on the cuffs can be washed in the bathroom sink, but there are two big wool blankets which won't fit in that sink. And we don't have a laundry tub! I remember when I was four or five we were living in an apartment that only had a shower, not a tub, and I was afraid of the shower, so my mom had a laundry tub for me to bathe in and at that age I fit in it comfortably. It was one of those round zinc ones. I've never even seen those for sale as an adult, and I love hardware stores.

I have seen sturdy black plastic tubs that are about that size and larger at hardware stores - they're used in construction, to mix concrete and thinset and mud and stuff in. Not sure that would be a sensible purchase though (it's so big!). My current idea is that I could wash blankets in one of our biggest size of plastic storage bins. The problem is all of them are full of stuff being stored and I'm not sure which one would make the most sense to temporarily borrow.

Another consideration: drying. Drying takes AGES when it's cold. Wool absorbs a lot of water and therefore takes a long time to dry, and sweaters have to dry flat. I suppose we can put the things in front of the stove and light a fire, but we can't keep it going until they're dry. I suppose I have to do this one wool object at a time.

ETA: I should just wait until it's spring and I can dry the blankets outside. The sweaters are more urgent than that, but they are also smaller. I'll just have to try to dry them by the fire.
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2026/023: Universality — Natasha Brown

What allowed some people to ‘make it’ while others faded away, as Hannah herself almost had? She knew it wasn’t a matter of hard work; she couldn’t have tried any harder than she did those last few years. Luck was a possible answer, but it seemed too callously random. Increasingly, Hannah felt another, truer word burning in her throat: class. The invisible privilege that everyone tried to pretend didn’t exist, but – it did. Hannah knew it did. She recognised it, and saw its grubby stains all over her own life. [p. 63]

A short novel about class, truth and culture wars. Read more... )

Tags:
Feb. 18th, 2026 07:13 pm

(no subject)

thawrecka: (Dilraba Dilmurat)
[personal profile] thawrecka
新年快乐!

I meant to post yesterday but I've been feeling a bit tired and rundown this past week. Hopefully better by the weekend - I have lunar new year celebrations and a friend's birthday to get to. Not to mention my book club tomorrow night!

Things watched recently:

• Seven episodes of Isekai Office Worker: The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter, an isekai BL anime about an accountant accidentally ending up in a fantasy world, reforming the royal accounts department, getting hooked on magical energy drinks it turns out he's allergic to... and being saved from an overdose by a handsome young knight in the world's silliest fuck-or-die scenario. And then continuing to make political waves with his accounting!!! power, which is just so satisfying to watch. DAMN THAT MAN LOVES TO ACCOUNTS. The subtitle of the show is correct, the other world's book do indeed depend on the bean counter, and not everyone is happy about him tracking their spending... I'm having so much fun with this! It's funny, but also in a strange way an office worker power fantasy, but also there's political fallout for everything and that feels right, too. Once the season's over I'll have to track down the books.

• All of season one of Lord of Mysteries, first in Chinese, and now I'm watching the English dub. I really will have to track down the novels, the first of which is already out in translation here (apparently the second is out elsewhere in the world but doesn't arrive in Australia until next month?? sigh). I'm hoping to track down that book tomorrow night, if the book store that claims to have a copy really does.

This is also a transmigration story, but it's a steampunk-y horror transmigration fantasy. The main character ends up in a world where people take potions to cultivate into eldritch monsters, basically. He spends the first episode bewildered (and so did I hahaha) but pretending he has any clue what's going on, and I think one of my favourite things is how both his Chinese voice actor and English voice actor give him the kind of voice that can trick you into thinking he's almost a totally normal guy... and then you step back and look at the facts and you're just like, wtf, Klein! He's a great character, but I also like a lot of the supporting cast; my favourite character is actually Leonard, a guy who once fell down a flight of stairs because he was distracted reading a book (relatable). Leonard regularly tries to act cool and mysterious at Klein, who keeps calling Leonard a weirdo instead of being impressed, and I'm very entertained.

I do have... extremely mixed feelings... about the evil secret sect of people who take potions that make them women which gives them more powers to do more evil things, and by mixed feelings I think that has very unfortunate implications but they are all unfortunately also so sexy.

• I watched the remaining episodes of Betrothed to my Sister's Ex, a really charming cinderella story type anime I started last year. Which is actually really good. I appreciate that it doesn't just have the charming romance of Marie coming to be loved by rich handsome dweeb Kyros and everyone else in the castle, as well as slowly learning to love herself, it also deals with how she and her younger sister were abused by their family in different ways, and the ending is a happy escape for both of them. I really liked it!

• I also finished This Monster Wants to Eat Me, a subtly yuri-flavoured anime about the main character's suicidal depression, and the monsters that would prefer her not to die, actually. And like, it really is very good, but it is also so heavy so it makes sense it took a while for me to finally get to the final episodes.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya (2026), truly the superior of the animated lesbian space princess movies I've watched so far this year. It does zip through plot very fast, so it's not without flaw, but I loved this lesbian sci fi take on the tale of the bamboo cutter, and the scissoring handshake is just an A+ detail. Great songs, a lot of fun.

• Which means Lesbian Space Princess (2025) is the lesser animated lesbian space princess movie I've seen this year. The songs are okay. I was stunned to learn after the fact that the homophobic blokey spaceship was voiced by Richard Roxburgh. It is sometimes funny. The best joke was the Maliens and the thespian. I don't regret watching it, but like... eh.

Scarlet (2025): Wow, it's amazing how IMAX can make a bad film worse. I didn't realise before going to see it that this was an AU version of Hamlet where Hamlet is a girl who meets a handsome Japanese man from the present day in the afterlife, so that was... strange. It's uh not good. Some of the emotional stuff would have worked better if those scenes had not been dragged out, and a lot of the animation is TV quality limited animation. Morally incoherent, which is a feat because it's so thin and slight. The bit with the imagined Shibuya dance sequence is uh... I don't even know. That sure was a film I watched.
Feb. 17th, 2026 04:44 pm

The water's depths can't kill me yet

sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
I did not end up accompanying [personal profile] rushthatspeaks and his child to the zoo this morning because I crashed so hard last night that I slept ten to eleven hours and am having difficulty remembering the day of the week, but he just dropped by with a [personal profile] nineweaving in the car and brought me my Christmas present of a sweater in the pattern of the Minoan octopus flask from Palaikastro and the cup with the scale motif from Archanes: it's spectacular. I was able to give him the collected cartoons and comics and poems of Le Guin's Book of Cats (2025). I got to see photographs of Artic and fennec foxes, flamingos and peccaries, sloth and snow leopard, porcupine and poison dart frog. Having spent the prior portion of my afternoon in the excitement of calling doctors and paying bills, my evening's plans involve couch and books.
grayswandir: Andy Lau smiling against a festive red and gold backdrop. (Andy Lau: :D)
[personal profile] grayswandir posting in [community profile] c_ent
Since we haven't had a picspam post lately, I thought maybe we could do one for Chinese New Year and post pics of your favorite C-ent actors/actresses/drama characters/singers etc. dressed up for the holiday (from any year!), whether for a photo shoot, ad, spring gala performance, music video, drama scene, or anything else. Gifs or links to videos also welcome! :)



(Zhu Yilong with red lanterns)

You can mention the actor/character/drama in your comment if you like (and add as much detail as you want), or just post your pics out of context. Spoiler cuts can be found in previous picspam posts if you need them!
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2026/022: Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur — Ian McDonald

Under a high blue heaven, under the zealous sun, the kid and his dinosaur travel a hot, empty highway. [first line]

Tif (short for Latif) is an orphan of Arab descent, whose ambition is to become a buckaroo at one of the dino rodeos. The novella's opening presents him, with his dinosaur, on a journey: only gradually are we shown where he's going, and why -- and where he's come from.

This is the post-apocalyptic future of the country formerly known as the United States of America, now a dangerous wilderness of miliciano gangs, religious states, and aggressive Dominion raiders. Tif's parents were killed in the South Dakota purification. He's recently been sacked from Dino! Dino! after a Timursaur escaped and wreaked havoc.Read more... )

Tags:
Feb. 16th, 2026 10:57 pm

Recent reading

troisoiseaux: (reading 2)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
In War and Peace, I've read through Book Three and the unglamorous shambles of the battle of Austerlitz, and one theme that's stuck out to me is the sort of... grim bureaucracy(?) of war: the Russian-Austrian war council adopts a battle strategy that many of them know won't work, more or less because they want get out of this meeting and it's basically already in place/too late to change their approach; the commanders actually in the field are mostly worried about not being the person blamed for anything going wrong:

Not wishing to agree to Dolgorukov's demand to commence the action, and wishing to avert responsibility from himself, Prince Bagration proposed to Dolgorukov to send to inquire of the commander in chief. Bagration knew that as the distance between the two flanks was more than six miles, even if the messenger were not killed (which he very likely would be), and found the commander in chief (which would be very difficult), he would not be able to get back before evening.

The selected messenger ends up being Nikolai Rostov, who does not die (despite, among other incidents, finding himself directly in the path of a unit of hussars charging at full gallop, because of course he did) but does fumble the chance to meet his idol Emperor Alexander: "But as a youth in love trembles, is unnerved, and dares not utter the thoughts he has dreamed of for nights," he's too shy to approach him even though he literally has an excuse to do so?? On the other hand, Prince Andrei is personally taken prisoner by his hero, Napoleon, although at that point he's kind of over it, having had an ongoing near-death experience and an accompanying revelation about "the insignificance of greatness."

I ended up skipping ahead in Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls and Other Writings to read "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" (1933), which was the main basis for the musical Guys & Dolls— it turns out that in the original story, there's no bet over whether gambler Sky Masterson can convince "missionary doll" Sarah Brown to join him on a day trip to Havana; he just falls for her on sight, tries to woo her by winning a guy's soul in a craps game to build up her mission, and then she catches on and comes marching in to gamble for his soul, which really ought to have made it into the musical but I've decided is how they make up off-stage between "Marry the Man Today" and the finale. (On the other hand, Sky's father's warning about not taking a bet from guys who "show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is never broken" and "offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear," because "as sure as you do you are going to get an ear full of cider," is wholesale Runyon.) I agree with [personal profile] osprey_archer that someone really ought to write a crossover between Runyon's dim-witted gangsters and P.G. Wodehouse's dim-witted toffs, especially because the last few (as read in order) stories have in fact involved befriending random civilians: in one, a trio of American gangsters are hired to assassinate the king of a small European country, only to discover that the king is about six and really keen on Al Capone and baseball; in another, a group of tough guys running a ticket-scalping racket (maybe more surprised than I should have been to discover this was a thing since at least the 1930s??) adopt a nice little doll who got stood up at the Harvard vs. Yale football game, and learn to love the epic highs and lows of college football in the process.
Feb. 16th, 2026 05:30 pm

educational meme postscript

thistleingrey: (Default)
[personal profile] thistleingrey
As a postscript to the educational privilege meme, two more prompts:

Added by [personal profile] hamsterwoman,
- the family/cultural attitude towards education--and also the attitude of the peers

And by [personal profile] cahn,
- Intellectual activities outside of school and family were available and facilitated

for me, these are linked )
Feb. 16th, 2026 06:48 pm

New Multifandom Vid

aurumcalendula: cropped poster for the webseries 'Nv Er Hong' featuring the characters Hua Yutang and Shiyi (Nv Er Hong (poster))
[personal profile] aurumcalendula posting in [community profile] c_ent
Title: One Woman Army
Fandom: Multifandom
Music: One Woman Army by Porcelain Black
Summary: 'I'm a one woman army'
Notes: Premiered at TGIFemslash 2026!
Warnings: quick cuts, flashing lights, violence

AO3 | DW | bsky | tumblr | YouTube
Feb. 16th, 2026 11:23 am

Education meme

cahn: (Default)
[personal profile] cahn
Educational meme from [personal profile] thistleingrey (also seen at a couple of other places under lock). I've answered for both my sister and myself (generally similar answers, sometimes not), as well as for my kids. (Will eventually lock.)
Cut for length )
Feb. 16th, 2026 02:21 pm

DNFs

lightreads: a partial image of a etymology tree for the Indo-European word 'leuk done in white neon on black'; in the lower left is (Default)
[personal profile] lightreads
Swordcrossed by Freya Marske

I’ve really liked some of her other books, but this one (secondary world M/M fantasy) just did not click. I got it from the library three times and appreciated Marske’s writing (always a highlight) but the trope set and the relationships just did not get me. Probably better if you like the inveterate liar falls in love thing.

Heavenly Bodies by Imani Erriu

Booktube strikes again. Enemies to lovers romantasy about the princess of the shadow kingdom kidnapped by the sunlight kingdom to train to kill a god. I was told this had good banter. The first 15% did not demonstrate that, just a lot of ham-handed writing and some cartoon sketchy worldbuilding. Meh.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

I think his Underground Railroad is genius. Which is saying something, since I generally do not like when a book has a speculative twist but gets shelved as literary. This falls in the same camp – it’s a literary take on the post zombie apocalypse thing. Meh. Genre has done it better, with more interesting people (our main character here is deliberately a boring sad sack, but still), and at least the genre book wasn’t like “but what if capitalism was the zombie all along, huh, huh, huh? How about that?” Well, okay, some genre books do that, but we don’t have critics shouting about how brilliant and innovative that is.

Luminous by Silvia Park

Literary scifi about three siblings (two human, one robot) in a future unified Korea. I developed a near instant dislike for this book. I am told it is interesting and goes deep on the relationships between humans and robots. Robots in this future being property and commodities as a formal matter, but as a functional matter serving as everything from members of the family to romantic partners to servants to victims of horrendous abuse, often more than one of those. There was something about the prose style that was like sandpaper to my ear, and I could tell in just the quarter I read that there was going to be a certain emotional grotesquery here that left me nauseous. It’s supposed to, but meh, no thanks, life’s too short.
Feb. 16th, 2026 02:43 pm

Talking about the weather...

cimorene: A guy flopped on his back spreadeagled on the floor in exhaustion (dead)
[personal profile] cimorene
I find it trying when it's 17° indoors (63), but manageable (with sweaters and wool socks etc) for the most part. But right now it's 14° (57) in the warmest room in the house.

It's too cold to knit, or sit writing or using a keyboard for very long, because all those things require my hands being outside the blankets. The only things it's not too cold to do are being inside a cocoon of blankets, or moving around so briskly that it warms me up temporarily. That's tough, though, because I hate the part before you warm up.
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Feb. 16th, 2026 11:00 am

Recent reading

luzula: a Luzula pilosa, or hairy wood-rush (Default)
[personal profile] luzula
Still not reading much, but I did read some books during the past two months!

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (2025)
Listened to the audiobook for my book club. This is the first book in a while that grabbed me in a page-turney way, and I enjoyed it a lot! I'm sure it can be picked at, and we did so during book club, but for me it was mostly notable in being a book I was immersed in while reading, which for me these days is rare.

The Sleeping Soldier by Aster Glenn Gray (2023)
When I first started reading this, my feeling was that "yeah, I read a lot of posts on the author's DW about this book, and I guess the book is exactly what I was expecting it to be". Like, in a way I felt as though I didn't even have to read the book. But this feeling passed when I got into the particulars of the characters and their relationships so that they felt real to me, so that it wasn't just about the Idea of the book any longer, and then I thoroughly enjoyed it. (The Idea of the book being, if you haven't heard of the book before, the contrast between what was allowable in male friendships in 1860 and 1960.)

I also listened to about half of The West Passage by Jared Pechaček (2024), also for book club. I feel like the book had a lot of Gormenghast DNA, and I enjoyed the weird worldbuiling, but I didn't end up finishing it.
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2026/021: The Earl Meets His Match — T J Alexander

“The fact of your existence is a miracle,” Harding said in a tone that brooked no argument. “... the scrutiny that you must have lived under...”
“Well, I also have pots of money,” Christopher pointed out, “so let’s not pretend it’s all been a chore.” [loc. 3139]

Delightful and cheering Regency romance. Lord Christopher Eden must, according to the terms of his inheritance, marry before his twenty-fifth birthday. That gives him four months to find a bride -- which is the last thing he wants. For Christopher is no ordinary man: he has a singular secret, which only his tailor is privy to.

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