Reading Wednesday
Mar. 26th, 2025 07:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby So many books, so little time. Okay
Just finished: Demon Engine by Marten Norr. Y'all are going to love this. It's extremely good. It's got a lot of the same DNA as The Scar by China Miéville—radical politics, seasteading, body horror, exploitation of non-human beings that you really shouldn't mess with, but vastly different. More trans, obviously, more accessible. Kind of Tamsyn Muir-esque in the humour though far more period. I wish there were pre-orders up because if you enjoy reading this blog you will probably be all over this.
Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption by Tucker Lieberman. There is (apparently, I am a bad Jew) a story in Leviticus about two sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu. During a sacrifice, they offer "strange fire," and God immolates them on the spot and Moses instructs the family not to mourn their deaths. Maybe they're drunk and covered in animal fat and light themselves on fire? Maybe they're being punished for something else? Their fire breaks God's commandment but it's pretty unclear how, exactly.
A caterpillar has a group of cells called an imaginal disc, which contain instructions for turning into a butterfly. They deconstruct and reconstruct the body within the chrysalis. A thing must be broken down before it can be changed.
Bad Fire is a memoir of transness and disability, of fire that is strange and wrong and bad, bodies that must be broken and reshaped, minds equally disjointed and destructive. It's beautifully written and will make you trans.
Ghost Ghost, Crooked Little Town, and The Same Water by Richard Fairgay. I'm grouping these together because they're all little chapbooks that each take about 5-10 minutes to read. Ghost Ghost is about a lonely ghost, a comic that began when the author was 7 and believed that no one made comics anymore so if he made them, wealth and fame certainly awaited, and completed when he was 37. There is one particular joke in there, about a dog, that is the meanest and most hilarious thing ever. Crooked Little Town, about a homophobic murder of a young boy, and The Same Water, about a woman seeking liberation from a bad relationship, are more serious in tone, gorgeously illustrated, magical realist fragments that suggest deeper, uncomfortable truths.
Currently reading: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. Still loving this. I don't have a lot to add.
Slow Horses by Mick Herron. I got really obsessed with the TV show but ran out of TV show so I'm reading the books now. It's about Slough House, a division of M15 where spies who done fucked up in some way get sent to do boring shitwork until they quit or retire. It's run by Jackson Lamb, a thoroughly repulsive human being who was reportedly one of the greatest spies ever during the Cold War, a grumpy Team Dad who may scathingly insult his people but also wants to keep them from being drawn into the kind of spy games that will destroy them. The new kid is River Cartwright, a sopping wet cat of a man who was sent to Slough House after a training exercise gone awry. He's desperate to get back to his otherwise promising career when the team stumbles on the kidnapping of a Pakistani student by white supremacists and has to actually do some spy shit to rescue him.
I expected this to be kind of plot-heavy and breezy in terms of the prose just because it makes for such engrossing TV, but it's actually as well-written as a novel as the show is well-written as TV. This is basically Le Carré 2.0—excellent writing, acronym soup, and more concerned with interiority than your bog-standard spy thriller.
Just finished: Demon Engine by Marten Norr. Y'all are going to love this. It's extremely good. It's got a lot of the same DNA as The Scar by China Miéville—radical politics, seasteading, body horror, exploitation of non-human beings that you really shouldn't mess with, but vastly different. More trans, obviously, more accessible. Kind of Tamsyn Muir-esque in the humour though far more period. I wish there were pre-orders up because if you enjoy reading this blog you will probably be all over this.
Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption by Tucker Lieberman. There is (apparently, I am a bad Jew) a story in Leviticus about two sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu. During a sacrifice, they offer "strange fire," and God immolates them on the spot and Moses instructs the family not to mourn their deaths. Maybe they're drunk and covered in animal fat and light themselves on fire? Maybe they're being punished for something else? Their fire breaks God's commandment but it's pretty unclear how, exactly.
A caterpillar has a group of cells called an imaginal disc, which contain instructions for turning into a butterfly. They deconstruct and reconstruct the body within the chrysalis. A thing must be broken down before it can be changed.
Bad Fire is a memoir of transness and disability, of fire that is strange and wrong and bad, bodies that must be broken and reshaped, minds equally disjointed and destructive. It's beautifully written and will make you trans.
Ghost Ghost, Crooked Little Town, and The Same Water by Richard Fairgay. I'm grouping these together because they're all little chapbooks that each take about 5-10 minutes to read. Ghost Ghost is about a lonely ghost, a comic that began when the author was 7 and believed that no one made comics anymore so if he made them, wealth and fame certainly awaited, and completed when he was 37. There is one particular joke in there, about a dog, that is the meanest and most hilarious thing ever. Crooked Little Town, about a homophobic murder of a young boy, and The Same Water, about a woman seeking liberation from a bad relationship, are more serious in tone, gorgeously illustrated, magical realist fragments that suggest deeper, uncomfortable truths.
Currently reading: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. Still loving this. I don't have a lot to add.
Slow Horses by Mick Herron. I got really obsessed with the TV show but ran out of TV show so I'm reading the books now. It's about Slough House, a division of M15 where spies who done fucked up in some way get sent to do boring shitwork until they quit or retire. It's run by Jackson Lamb, a thoroughly repulsive human being who was reportedly one of the greatest spies ever during the Cold War, a grumpy Team Dad who may scathingly insult his people but also wants to keep them from being drawn into the kind of spy games that will destroy them. The new kid is River Cartwright, a sopping wet cat of a man who was sent to Slough House after a training exercise gone awry. He's desperate to get back to his otherwise promising career when the team stumbles on the kidnapping of a Pakistani student by white supremacists and has to actually do some spy shit to rescue him.
I expected this to be kind of plot-heavy and breezy in terms of the prose just because it makes for such engrossing TV, but it's actually as well-written as a novel as the show is well-written as TV. This is basically Le Carré 2.0—excellent writing, acronym soup, and more concerned with interiority than your bog-standard spy thriller.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 12:16 pm (UTC)Amazing how quickly I went from "yes, sounds good!" to "maybe not." May still pick it up if I come across it at the library though.
And Bad Fire does sound intriguing.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 12:26 pm (UTC)He's one of the few authors who makes me regularly look up words while reading. I love his prose style.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 10:03 pm (UTC)He had a bit about a discarded bottle fused to the ground by urban lichen and that imagery lives rent-free in my brain now.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 12:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 10:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 01:29 pm (UTC)Well... now I'm not.
a story in Leviticus about two sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu
Bible studies never covered this. Or Leviticus. So....
no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 03:48 pm (UTC)I don't know how to connect the first to the second part of your Bad Fire description, but the second part sounds like an awesome blurb. :)
Nice, reading Slow Horses. I need to get off here so I have reading time.
Bonus Jackson Lamb content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Oa5-aoHiA
no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 10:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 05:24 pm (UTC)And thank you for the posts like this. Cause of one of the posts earlier, got Erdirch's "Future Home of the Living God" in my Libby app now. And it is very good! (i mean, dystopian-but-quite-realistic scares aside)
no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 10:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 11:46 pm (UTC)But also I feel like Alec Guinness was the definitive whoever he played. Like he doesn't even look like George Smiley. I don't care. I retroactively ignored the description in the books and my mental image is Alec Guinness instead.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-26 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-27 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-27 11:20 am (UTC)