Reading Wednesday

 Just finished: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (translated by Angela Rodel). As I suspected last week when I raved about it, the ending of this book didn't disappoint, and it's one of the best things I've read all year. It'll probably be up there with The Memory Police for 2022 books that live rent-free in my head the way Severance did last year or the year before (what even is time???). It's an absolutely stunning meditation on time, memory, nostalgia, and totalitarianism. Darkly comic and wrenching in equal measure. Makes me feel like a hack and a fraud for even putting down a single word on paper.

Night Beats: Ghost in the Vending Machine by Saevelle. Are Wattpad novels allowed here? Oh wait, it's my blog, I get to decide, and yes, Wattpad novels are allowed.

Now, I'm biased because I was one of the people who started Night Beats. Maybe you were too, since I did a brainstorming post on this very blog. It's a Creative Commons-licensed concept for a cheesy early Noughts-style paranormal police procedural—think X-Files meets Supernatural meets Forever Knight. Basically, you can slip it into your creative project if you need to make a reference that won't get dated.*

So it's been used quite a bit already, and you can find out more on the website and even subscribe to the monthly newsletter, which is excellent. But to my knowledge Saevelle is the first person to actually write an entire episode. And it's glorious.

The story alternates between the episode itself and the behind-the-scenes filming of it. In the episode, a sex worker is murdered by some kind of monster, and Jordan and Jane have to both solve the case and keep her ghost, trapped in a coin, safe. Meanwhile in Toronto, the actors, stunt people, and makeup artists deal with the ups and downs of minor celebrity and on-set romances. It's sweet and funny and as a Torontonian one degree away from the film industry, she gets it perfectly. And I love the episode itself—it has all the dramatic beats and character moments of a show like this, and Saevelle's cinematic writing style lets you picture it as if on screen.

There's already a second story up so I'm going to read that next time there's a lull in my library holds.

Hallowed Emancipation by S.M. Berry. I actually read this awhile ago as an ARC, but for some reason didn't have it up on my log and I'm not sure if I ever blogged about it. But anyway. If I didn't, it's a novella about a guy, struggling with trauma and recovery, who falls in love with, er, a Biblically accurate angel. 

Currently reading: Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples by Erica Lagalisse. Okay where has this book, and this author, been all my life? I mean, it was worth buying for the frontispiece alone. Lagalisse takes as her starting point both the marginalization of Indigenous women of faith within anarchist communities and the prevalence of conspiracy theories, antisemitic and otherwise, and takes us on an absolutely wild ride through the idea that religiosity and occultism were present in the anarchist movement from the very beginning. Examining Renaissance magic, French Revolutionary conspiracies, and the New Age movement, Lagalisse explores gender,  counterculture, religion, and politics in a way that is accessible and critical.

One of the criticisms that many (present company included) tend to have of anarchism as a movement is the dearth of serious contemporary scholarship by people not named David Graeber, and this book does a lot of heavy lifting in correcting that. Intricately researched with footnotes that are fascinating enough to make for years of future reading, I am absolutely obsessed with it.

* In other words, it exists purely because JKR is a TERF and someone had to edit all the Harry Potter references out of her book.