The Antisocial Socialist

Just finished: When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory. This mostly did land the ending, yes. It really pulls off the hat trick of cool sci-fi concept, retelling of a classic for the modern era, and leaning into the premise with a large cast of detailed and fascinating characters.

52 Ways to Reconcile: How to Walk with Indigenous Peoples on the Path to Healing, David Alexander Robertson. This was a quick but unexpectedly joyful read. It's basically a list of things that settlers can do to further reconciliation, from attending a powwow to joining a protest to watching Indigenous comedy. One thing a week, for a year. Robertson is one of the few children's writers that I genuinely like, and he brings that energy to his nonfiction, writing in a way that is accessible but never condescending. A large part of why I stayed on Twitter as long as I did was his tweets so it's good to read nonfiction from him again.

Currently reading: Behind You by Catherine Hernandez. I meant to read this when it first came out and even saw her read an excerpt at Word on the Street. But somehow it slipped past me. No more. It's the story of a filmmaker editing a true crime series who reaches an episode about a local infamous serial killer (Hernandez doesn't name him, so I won't, but anyone reading it in Canada will know immediately). I'm not very far in, but so far it's got all the hallmarks of what I love about her writing.

Just finished: Owning the Unknown: A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God by Robert Charles Wilson. I think I would have liked more sci-fi in this book about sci-fi and religion (Christianity) and atheism, as evidenced by there being two short stories at the end that I enjoyed a great dea.

As an atheist, I found the arguments in this book convincing up to the point of being agnostic about a specifically Christian God, but didn't make the logical leap that the other did to atheism about all gods. Which doesn't mean it's not worth reading, but I wanted it to go farther and deeper than it did.

Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community by Maggie Helwig. Complete coincidence that I read these one after another by the way; Encampment was next up on my list anyway. But I do think they provide an interesting contrast and go a long way to explaining why I find Wilson's arguments less interesting.

Encampment isn't about religion per se, despite being written by a priest and taking place on the grounds of a church and including some sermons. It's about mutual aid and community and the cruelty of the state towards its nominal subjects.

I once really weirded out a friend of mine of the more stoner persuasion by saying that I was almost completely uninterested in questions of where the universe came from or how it was created or whether there's life after death—things that he apparently spent a long time pondering. What is much more interesting to me is how we ought to act now, in relationship to each other and the planet. What we owe to each other by virtue of our own shared beinghood.

Maggie will say that she did nothing special. She allowed a tent encampment on her church's property (well, the issue of whose property becomes a major question in the City's fight to dismantle the encampment, but I've been there and it's very obviously part of the church). Then she tried to take care of those people as best she could. Unfortunately in the world that we live in, this is in fact extremely special and extremely heroic. This is not an easy task; many of these people have untreated psychiatric disorders, many have addictions, and beyond that, the tangled bureaucracies that nominally exist to help them are fragile as cobwebs, underfunded, and under resourced. 

This book broke my heart. I of course know this story well. Everyone in Toronto does. I argue about encampments in Facebook groups on the regular. The upcoming municipal election may hinge on them. I'm old enough to remember that Star Trek DS9 episode where a tent city was an indication of how deeply into dystopia Earth had fallen; now they are common enough that most people just walk by them every day. Maggie tells the story of the individuals who found themselves in these tents and their fight for basic dignity along with survival. She makes the invisible visible (which, isn't that part of what both religion and literature do?).

It's the best thing I've read this year, and I might buy like a million copies to give to people, especially if it looks like might Bradford win—not that Chow is great, but Bradford would build death camps if he could. Anyway, read it. It'll take you like a night.

Currently reading: Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer. I love everything Naomi writes though I went into this with a little trepidation as I have a phobia around pregnancy and birth. It's about an OB/GYN who finds herself unemployed after terminating a pregnancy in North Dakota to save a woman's life. She gets a weird call about an interview for a job with a group of midwifes, which turns out to be bait to kidnap her and bring her to a cult compound, where many of the women and girls are pregnant. Also, the last doctor they brought there was murdered by one of the cult members.

If I hadn't been so tired last night I'd have binged through this in one night—it's hella tense and unsettling and Dr. Liz's wry, grounded narration is a perfect contrast to how disturbing the cultists are (fundie baby voice is a real thing and  y i k e s  on bikes).

It's been a trickle due to working 12-14 hours days pretty much every day, but here we are.

Just finished: Starfish by Peter Watts. Sometimes you read a book published 27 years ago and it doesn't hold up, and sometimes you read a book published 27 years ago and it's actually much, much more brilliant than you remembered it being. Come for the disturbing underwater horrors, stay for the head cheese AI. Bleak and devastating.

Currently reading: Killing Shakespeare by Koom Kankesan. Time for a YA break. Nathan, a jerk jock who apparently has a heart of gold but I'm still waiting to see evidence of this, is suspended after writing an AI paper and locking his old-fashioned English teacher in a cupboard. Along with Isabel, a bookish prof's daughter, and Suresh, a nerdy comp sci kid, he's transported back to Elizabethan England with the goal of making sure that all of Shakespeare's plays go up in the Globe fire and thus he doesn't have to write essays on them. It's a pretty cute conceit. Of course things go wrong and the three end up earlier in time than intended, with Suresh apprenticing under Doctor Dee, Nathan joining one of Sir Francis Drake's privateering expeditions, and Isabel working as a serving girl for the Bard himself. It's fun and introduces quite a bit of complexity in its portrayal of the era (and also the current debates over studying the Western literary canon).

Just finished: The First Thousand Trees by Premee Mohamed. This was really good, and I felt speaks to a growing need in the post-apoc/dystopia genre for the kind of books that ask "okay, but what do we do now?" It could very well be a story of a city boy who gets repeatedly shown by rural folk how incompetent he is, but it goes deeper, probing the flaws of the kind of society that prides itself in a hardworking, hard-living ethos. What that means for people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, neurodiverse people, and so on.

Did I mention it was set in Alberta? Lool.

And of course it's beautifully written, and other than the fictional fungus, absolutely realist in its depiction of the climate crisis, because Premee is both a fantastic prose stylist and a scientist. 

I want to go back and read the first two now, but I know things that you may not know about what she has coming out next, which is even more up my alley.


Currently reading: A Palace Near the Wind by Ai Jiang. I've been meaning to read Ai Jiang for ages and I'm most of the way through this one, which doesn't disappoint. It's about a princess of an oppressed people forced to marry a king in order to stop the palace's incursion into her people's territory. Her mother and sisters have gone to the palace before her, never to be seen again. She has one younger sister left and she is determined to kill the king and end these sacrificial marriages—and the destruction of her lands—once and for all.

Oh did I mention that they're all trees? They're all trees. 14/10 worldbuilding, no notes. The reveal that they're trees comes pretty early and I won't spoil anything else but I was like. Good job. That's weird af. I'm here for it.

Just finished: Written On the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay. Yeah, I just don't know what to make of this one. I liked every element, including what I really do think is a deliberate distancing mechanism. But it didn't cohere for me. It was all sweep and no substance, if that makes sene.

I think there is a huge challenge when your main character and some of your secondary characters are poets, which is the same problem as making them the Greatest Investigative Reporter Of All Time. Stephen King got it right; he makes a lot of his writer characters hacks and frauds churning out work for an agent. Thierry, the main character in this book, is a tavern poet who draws the ire of the powerful through bawdy, satirical poetry, but we never see anything truly edgy from him. It's probably not my main problem with the book, but it's indicative of what feels like a weird kind of restraint to get down and dirty with the characters.

I do think it's good overall, but I wanted to figure out why people are so feral for this guy and I still don't know, beyond that he does really write beautiful prose.

Currently reading: Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg. Speaking of getting down and dirty with the characters, this is much more up my alley, and holy shit. I was primed to like this after hearing a podcast interview with the author but it really is wild. It's the deathbed ramblings of Barbara Rosenberg, mother of Jordy Rosenberg, though it's a fictionalized Barbara and a fictionalized Jordy, and while she did die, they had reconciled to a far greater extent than the characters seen here. Barbara is a TERF and a Zionist and Jordy is trans and a Marxist. She's vile to him from childhood but as she sickens, she's increasingly and resentfully reliant on him. He barely appears in the present part of the narrative, except as a weird giant bird (she's on a lot of opioids) that's menacing her.

The other day I had drinks with a friend that I met over the internet who's visiting Toronto from New York, and we bonded over a shared love of Tony Kushner's Angels In America. She referred to the Roy Cohn character as "Cohn with Kushner's fist up his ass," which is really what's happening here. It's very much the voice of A Character but used in an incredibly skillful way to get across her interiority while also examining and critiquing her worldview. This is absolutely a real sort of person—I'm related to a lot of Barbaras, let me tell you—but it's also sort of elevated to this Shakespearean tragedy.

This book is hitting me hard. Barbara is a monster, yes, but she's a monster with depth and dimension and specificity, and as someone who often writes from the monster's point of view, she's just incredibly compelling. I can't imagine what it took for Jordy Rosenberg to write this. I would specifically anti-recommend this for a lot of people but I am enthralled.

Also very grateful for my own mom for not being like this omg.

Just finished: Nothing

Currently reading: Five Points On an Invisible Line by Su J Sokol. This is the sequel to Invisible Line, and follows the main characters: Laek, Janie, and their kids Siri and Simon, three years after they fled the US and settled in Montreal. They're now joined by Philip, Laek's best friend and former colleague, who had been devastated when he left because he'd been in love with Laek the entire time. Much of the book feels very slice-of-life, with the adults navigating poly relationships and the immigration system, while the kids figure out their identities, except that lurking beneath the surface, everyone except for Simon is involved in some kind of clandestine revolutionary activity and can't tell anyone else about it.

It's a really cool story. There's a tension in genre writing where deep down, everyone kind of wants the trauma to matter, but the tight pacing required to actually create a readable story often doesn't allow enough space for it, and so you get stories where characters just shrug off the physical and emotional costs of fighting the good fight. Otherwise, you have characters spending the whole time talking about their feelings and processing. This to me strikes a good balance; it is absolutely about dealing with trauma, and specifically dealing with the trauma of state violence, but it's also compulsively readable and full of cliffhangers.

maevedarcy is posting a meme a day for 3 Weeks 4 Dreamwidth and well, of course I had to.

This week I'm reading: Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple

My favorite book of all time is: I don't really have one. I have favourites for different purposes, like Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy for turning me into, alas, a comedic speculative fiction writer, or Vita Nostra for rewiring my brain, or Moby-Dick for becoming my entire personality for two years, or or or.

My current favorite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months) is: The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar

The last book I bought was: It's on pre-order, but Obstetrix by naomikritzer .

The first book I bought with my own money was: I honestly have no idea.

The first book I received as a gift was: It would have been a children's book? Maybe The Little Prince or Alice's Adventures In Wonderland or something, both of which I was always pretty obsessed with.

The last book I received as a gift was: Always On by Helena Trooperman

The last book I borrowed from the library was: Grendel by John Gardner

The book physically closest to me right now is: There are no books physically close to me because nearly everything is on ebook. The closest paper book is Wake Up! (Book Winter) by R Merey, because tRaum books are beautiful and I paid a dumb amount to get the pretty edition from Germany.

This or that
Physical book or e-book: e-book. I'm a traitor, I know.
Used or new: Library
Fiction or non-fiction: Fiction, but a good non-fiction will engross me
Read at a coffee shop or at the park: Traditionally, a coffee shop, but with covid, park.
Paperback or hardcover: E-book, but if it has to be physical, paperback.
Romance or Crime: Best when combined, not a big fan of either on their own.

Yes or no
Stream of consciousness? Fuck yes
Poetry? Yes
Memoirs? No
Philosophy? Sure
Thrillers? Nah
Chronicles? Nope
Travel logs? Big no
Dialogue heavy? Sure

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple. This is a weirdly dense book—like, not in terms of content but in terms of typography where it turns out to be much longer than it looks. So it will take awhile and I'll no doubt have very scattered thoughts on it. I'm up to a weird point just before WWII where Piłsudski has done a coup in Poland and provided some kind of respite for the Bund there, while Molly's great-great grandfather Sam is in the US, trying to make it as an artist. The revolution in Russia has almost immediately turned sour. The Zionist movement is ascendant in Eastern Europe but still looked on as profoundly unserious by the Bundist majority, who are like, "you're going to be farmers in the desert? Good luck with that and also fuck you." 

This is just such an important book, right now in our history with what was once the biggest current of socialist thought in Europe being whittled down to a few of us hobbyists in 2026. It's not just hereness, but a lineage that I think most Ashkenazi Jews are lacking, even ones like me who know a fair bit about the Bund. The majority of Jews in the West have accepted the Devil's bargain of whiteness: give up your culture for safety and assimilation into the power structure, sure celebrate your holidays but now you're part of the dominant culture. There have been times, watching the livestreamed genocide of Gaza, that I have thought, "well, can I just not be Jewish anymore? I want no part of it, I want to wash my hands of it, I cannot participate if this is what most of us feel is okay," but you can't, can you? I mean you can but not in any meaningful way that helps even a single person. It's better to have a history, to know why and how that history has been suppressed, not because of some nostalgia or historical LARPing but because of the whole "first as tragedy, then as farce" of it all.

Which is to say that this book is giving me a lot of feels. You should read it, probably.

Well looks like this sorry, battered world is still there, at least this part of the world, so here's what I'm reading I guess.

Just finished: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. This whipped. Blood-soaked historical fiction set in the early 1900s as a Pikuni vampire tangles with a Lutheran minister in the wake of a horrific massacre. All of the trigger warnings, obviously as it's quite literally visceral, which is not the most upsetting thing about it. Jones is really quite a brilliant writer.

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. This is not the kind of thing that I normally like but works well as a chaser to the previous book, in that it's low-stakes, cozy, and fun. It's about a group of emancipated sentient robots, a car (also sentient), and a human who take over a ghost kitchen in the aftermath of a war between California and the rest of the US. If they don't pay off their debts, they'll be re-sold into slavery, but this is not the kind of book where that happens. It works for me largely because of the descriptions of the biang biang noodles, but it's also about the big theme of the year, which is who counts as a person.

Currently reading: About to start The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar.

Just finished: To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose. I absolutely loved this—it was a worthy sequel to the first one, and I ended up kind of binge-reading it because it's so compelling even though for the first three quarters, nothing much of anything happens. It's just a slow burn of political tensions so by the time things explode, you should have seen it coming but maybe don't, because as wise and savvy as our heroine is, she's still a 16-year-old girl navigating school, relationships, and family.

I immediately went to one of my Discord servers to squeal about it and was rewarded with some uncomfortable speculation about the author's heritage so I am hoping those rumours aren't true because I need her to be as cool as she seems.

Grendel by John Gardner. I have been meaning to read this for ages as it's one of those books where when people get to know me, they'll say "oh have you read this" and I'll say "no but it's on my list." Anyway it lives up to the hype. I don't know that the idea of telling a well-known story from the monster's perspective was all that new in the 70s, but it's far more than that. It's a literary masterpiece in terms of the prose, which is squelching and visceral, and it takes some unexpected philosophical turns, especially the bits with the dragon and the mad peasant, that feel fresh and relevant even today.

Currently reading: Always On by Helena Trooperman. And now we're back to the world of indie SF. This one is about an inventor, single mom to five children after her husband's death, struggling to get her career back on track. She discovers a way to power cellphones through human static electricity, which brings her in direct conflict with Big Oil. It's pretty interesting, brought down a little by some strange dialogue choices, but overall compelling character and a cool type of plot that the genre doesn't usually do anymore.