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Jul. 24th, 2025 10:24 am

Headache, by Tom Zeller, Jr

rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


A solid, well-written, and generally engaging book about migraine and cluster headaches. The author suffers from the latter, with suffer being the operative word - cluster headaches are called "suicide headaches" because people with them are known to kill themselves because of the intractable, excruciating pain.

The first-person account was the best part of the book: what it's like to have cluster headaches, how you're driven to hoard medication because you're not allowed to have enough (which leads doctors to view you with suspicion as a drug-seeker - NO SHIT you seek painkillers when you're in pain!), how you cling to any doctor who will take you seriously, and the psychology of chronic pain generally.

(In Zeller's case, he wasn't seeking opiods or anything that could get him high, but a medication that does nothing to anyone but stop cluster headaches if you have one. But his doctor didn't believe that he actually got them as often as he did, and his insurance company didn't want to pay out for his medication, so he was forced to hoard and ration his medication for no good reason, and then looked at with suspicion when he asked for more.)

The book gets a bit into the weeds in terms of the biological mechanism of cluster and migraine headaches, which is not yet known, and the reasons why there's little research or funding devoted to them. But overall, a good book that will make people with chronic headaches, or any chronic pain, feel seen.
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Recent DNFs (Did Not Finish)

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, by Clay McLeod Chapman



A horror novel about - I think - how a Q-Anon analogue turns people into literal zombies. I couldn't get into this book. I don't think it was bad, it just wasn't my thing. I didn't vibe with the prose style at all.

The Baby Dragon Cafe, by A. T. Qureshi



A woman opens a cafe that's also a baby dragon rescue. I adored the idea of this book, not to mention the extremely charming cover, but the execution left a lot to be desired. It was just plain dull. I dragged myself through two chapters, both of which felt eternal, then gave up. Too bad! I really wanted to like it, because the idea is delightful.

In the Path of Destruction: Eyewitness Chronicles of Mount St. Helens, by Richard Waitt



This ought to have been exactly my jam, except for the author's absolutely bizarre prose style, which is a combination of Pittman shorthand and Chuck Tingle's Twitter minus the sense of humor, with an allergy to articles and very strange syntax. I literally had no idea what some of his sentences meant. This weirdness extends to direct quotes from multiple people, making me suspect how direct they are. And yes, this was traditionally published.

Here are some quotes, none of which make more sense in context:

It contrasts the chance jungle violence with lava flows off Kilauea - so Hollywood but predictable.

"The state's closure seems yours. Have I missed something?"

[And here's a bunch of Tinglers.]

Heart attack took Eddie in 1975.

These years since wife Eddie died Truman's fire has cooled.

Since wife Eddie died, Rob is the closest he has to a friend.

Since wife Eddie died, Truman has been a bleak recluse, the winters especially lonely.
Jul. 22nd, 2025 08:22 am

voter registration shenanigans

gingicat: Bengal tiger looking peeved (anger/protectiveness - tigerbright)
[personal profile] gingicat posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew
The three registered voters in our household each got a folded postcard from our local Board of Elections in a small Massachusetts city. On the outside, one side has the name and address; on the other side, it has a voter confirmation form. On the *inside*, there's the following:

"Dear Voter:
Our records show that you have not answered the annual street listing (census) as required by law (Massachusettes General Law Ch. 51 S. 4). Therefore, your name will be designated as "inactive" on the voting list.
If you have not moved or if you have moved to a new address in the City of Medford, please return the attached postage-paid postcard and you will be restored immediately to active voter status.
If you have moved to another City/Town or State, complete, sign and return the attached postage-paid postcard and your name will be removed from the voter list in Medford. You must register to vote in your new City/Town. You may use a mail-in form or online at www.registertovotema.com to register in Massachusetts .
If you do not return the attached postcard, your name will be removed from the voting list if you do not vote in at least one of the next two federal elections or take other action that would reinstate you as an active voter. (per M. G. L. Ch. 51 S. 37A)"

N.B. - I returned our city census and we have all voted in the last three elections.

So yeah, voter suppression exists even in this very blue state, and they're probably hoping people will ignore this reminder in a local elections year. Check your mail! And you can find out how to check your voter registration in another state at vote.org.
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


Kelly Ramsey became a hotshot - the so-called Special Forces of firefighting - with three strikes against her. She's a woman on an otherwise all-male crew, a small woman dealing with equipment much too big for her, and 36 years old when most of the men are in their early 20s. If that's not enough, it's 2020 - the start of the pandemic - and California is having a record fire year, with GIGAFIRES that burn more than ONE MILLION acres. At one point her own hometown burns down.

The memoir tells the story of her two seasons with the Rowdy River Hotshots, her relationship with her awful fiance (also a firefighter, on a different crew), her relationship with her alcoholic homeless father, and a general memoir of her life. I'd say about three-fifths of the book is about the hotshots, and two-fifths are her fiance/her father/her life up to that point.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I was WAY more interested in the hotshots than in her personal life. The fiance was loosely relevant to her time with the hotshots (he was jealous of both the male hotshots and of her job itself), and her alcoholic father and her history of impulsive sexual relationships was relevant to her personality, but you could have cut all of that by about 75% and still gotten the point.

All the firefighting material is really interesting, and Ramsey does an impressively good job of not only vividly depicting hotshot culture, but also differentiating 19 male firefighters. I had a good idea of what all of them were like and knew who she meant whenever she mentioned one, and that is not easy. You get a very good idea of both the technique and sheer physical effort it takes to fight fires, along with plenty of info on fire behavior and the history of fire in California. (She does not neglect either climate change or the indigenous use of fire.)

This feels like an incredibly honest book. Ramsey doesn't gloss over how gross and embarrassing things get when no one's bathed for weeks, you've been slogging through powdery ash the whole time, there's no toilets, and you're the only one who menstruates. She depicts not only the struggle of trying to keep up with a bunch of younger, stronger, macho guys, but how desperate she is to be accepted by them as one of the guys and how this causes problems when another woman joins the crew - a woman who openly points out that flawed men are welcomed while every mistake she makes is taken as a sign that women can't do the job.

I caught myself wishing that Ramsey hadn't had an affair with one of her crew mates as many readers will think "Yep, that's what happens when women get on crews," and then realizing that I hadn't thought that about the man who had the affair with her. Even I blamed Ramsey and not the equally culpable dude!

Ramsey reminded me at times of Amy Dunn's vicious description of the "cool girl" in Gone Girl, but to her credit, she's aware that this is a persona she adopted to please men and fill the void left by her alcoholic dad. Thankfully, there's a lot more to the book than that.
executrix: (Default)
[personal profile] executrix posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew
oin us for the next Digital Defenders this Tuesday, July 22 at 8PM ET!

We’re diving into the wild side of the web where feminism meets fan culture, from stan wars to shitposts, fanfic to fandom memes. Let’s talk about how fan spaces and meme culture are part of feminist movement building!

📅 Tuesday, July 22
⏰ 8PM ET/5PM PT
🔗 RSVP at https://ow.ly/N9m850WqUjp
Jul. 17th, 2025 10:07 am

Good Trouble Lives On

gingicat: LIBERTY/JUSTICE is my femslash (liberty/justice)
[personal profile] gingicat posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew
Today!

You can attend a virtual rally:
https://www.mobilize.us/john-lewis-actions/event/803723/

Good Trouble Lives On: Virtual Rally happening today at 6pm Eastern/5pm Central/4pm Mountain/3pm Pacific and you can join us here: https://www.youtube.com/@WeArePeoplePowerUnited/streams No worries if you are late or can't make it, we will share the video as well.
Jul. 16th, 2025 04:34 pm

C.J. Cherryh bibliography

coffeeandink: (me + nypl = otp)
[personal profile] coffeeandink

Sources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves

I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.

Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.

ExpandCut for length )

Jul. 14th, 2025 10:48 pm

The Very Slow C.J. Cherryh Reread

coffeeandink: (books!)
[personal profile] coffeeandink
Welcome to the Very Slow C.J Cherryh Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.

Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) Since the mid-70s, she has written 77 novels and four short story collections (1); self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.

Notes towards an overview
  • It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won three Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like many of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think some of it is also due to the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and having to figure out oceanography and navigation pn the fly while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)

  • Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up hints and asides and put together information by implication, or, if you can't do that, at least to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no comprehension of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.

  • Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned in a tossed-off subordinate clause in a passage focused on something else entirely, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.

  • Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)

  • I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.

Series and other groupings
I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:

  • The Union-Alliance universe
    Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.

    In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.

    The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)

    Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.)

  • The atevi series
    In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.

    The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.

    The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.

    This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.

    The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.)

  • Fantasies
    Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).

    Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, desperate, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably ends up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought.

  • Shared-world work
    The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume, grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.

    For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh relied on her college major and Master's degree in Classics to write about Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short storie; some of the short fiction was incorporated into the two novel collaborations with Morris and Cherryh's solo Heroes in Helll novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.

    Cherryh launched her own shared world series, Merovingen Nights,with the solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies. She described several of the anthologies as "mosaic novels", and they do indeed show an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the stories penned by different authors. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are very solid.

Full disclosure
This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.

I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.

Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.

I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Hugo Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then-present day, but I think that's it.)

Other Cherryh reading projects


Endnotes
1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]

2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]
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