Reading Wednesday

Just finished: The Meaning Wars and Poe's Outlaws by Michelle Patricia Browne. #4 and #5 in the omnibus. #4 is the Shit Gets Real novella; #5 is a beach episode, where the characters take a breather, sort through their shit, and commit themselves to joining the revolution in Indus, a disenfranchised colony. I described this elsewhere as queer found family space opera with rad dinosaur aliens, reeducation camps for governesses, a creepy as fuck religious cult, and some excellent pew pew pew. The final episode of Poe's Outlaws, where our heroes navigate a swamp in order to rescue the rebel leader, is a prime example of what works for me about this series—while it's substantially more hopeful than one would expect for dystopian fiction, it's mired in some gritty, grounded reality that turns what was heretofore the lightest instalment of the series into gripping suspense.

Currently reading: A Jade's Trick by Michelle Patricia Browne. This is the last one. There's a high price on the heads of Patience and Sarah, with every bounty hunter nearby gunning for them, and look, all you need to know about this is that there's a space pirate union, and if you are the kind of person who reads "space pirate union" and goes "YES," you will enjoy this a lot.

Crow Winter by Karen McBride. No progress on this one this week.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In case you're wondering how Ishmael's mental health is going, he's tattooed the measurements of a whale's skeleton on his right arm. No art or adaptation ever created for this book, before Tumblr got ahold of it, has done its level of bonkers justice. I mean also it's just beautiful. But bonkers.