Belated reading Wednesday

 Is this a thing now? We post what we're reading on Wednesdays? Because I like that idea and two of you just posted about what you're reading and I only now noticed the pattern. In fairness a lot of the time I'm reading and posting half-awake. So.

Just finished: Vita Nostra by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko, which I'm still obsessed with. It's a magical boarding school (well, university) novel in the vein of The Magicians, if every professor in the school was Mayakovsky only less warm, and they never actually told you that you were learning magic. Our protagonist has plans of her own for her life that do not involve this, and she's dragged into her new world kicking and screaming, under threat of some mysterious harm befalling her family. I fell utterly for Sasha and the world as a whole. There are two other novels but they haven't been translated into English, and according to my friend are also hard to find in Russian. But they're apparently not about either Sasha or the school so I guess I can wait.

Currently reading: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. I've had a hold on this forever, as in since before it came out, but then a friend bought me a copy for my birthday so yay! It's supposed to be the African Game of Thrones, which, ish? In that it is a grimdark epic fantasy. Apparently he pitched it as such as a joke. But it is much more on the magical end of the fantasy spectrum, and tbh had me at "mud mermaids." It's about a tracker named Tracker and a shapeshifting hunter named Leopard who are recruited to search for a boy who disappeared three years earlier. The worldbuilding is just phenomenal, rich and detailed and imaginative, though I am halfway through and there haven't been mud mermaids yet.

Massive trigger warnings for both. If that's a thing for you, I can tell you.

rage intensifies

 Tomorrow, a whole lot of really great teachers are going to find out that they've lost their jobs. Not positions in schools, but jobs. Most new teachers have at least a Masters and have spent 7-10 years on the supply list before they hit permanent contract (not me, but I squeaked in just as the door was closing) and all of that hard work and stability is going to be yanked away at the whim of a government that has the money to break billion dollar contracts and fight for the right to ravage the climate at will, but not to educate its children. We're talking about some of the most well-educated, passionate teachers in the system. Out of work. 

While Ford caps public sector wage increases below inflation for those lucky enough to remain employed (approximately 1 million workers), he has raised wages for his own friends.

But perhaps most insulting of all is that he is giving his government two extra months off. That's right. The government gets a five-month vacation.

I mean, on the plus side, that's five months where they can't do any damage (and as a friend put it, every time one of them opens their mouths, the chances of Scheer becoming PM drop by 2%). I'm all for them never coming back, personally.

But no one had better ever, ever, complain about teachers getting summers off in my presence ever again or I will smack them right back into the days of the rural one-room schoolhouse with my goddamned learning stick, I swear to fuck.

I'm going to go and listen to some very loud, very silly metal, and hopefully get some of the anger out of my system.