Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series would’ve been vastly better if it’d resembled in novel form Lingua Ignota’s “Faithful Servant Friend of Christ.”
Now that I coulda worked with.
Books
Not That
Now that I can competently read books in the original French, some of the translations into English are…uhhh, rather creative. Like, that’s really not what the book said.
But I guess that’s true of all translations, though I can only read well enough in French and Spanish to really get the feel and make any determination. Working on German and Italian still. Subtitles are that way, too. I guess it’s the peril of translation.
Carly or Something
The was some sf book I read where a Sydney Sweeney-like starlet gets chosen for some publicity space mission, but a disaster happens so she does scary space stuff and people are surprised she’s brave and not a complete prat? What fucking book was that?
Goddamn I’ve read too many books. I think the book would be 10-15 years old now.
Powering
There’s been a spate of “empowering” novels recently about older women having affairs and dalliances with younger men. And I have no problem with this. I put “empowering” in quotes because why is it empowerment when a woman does it, but not when a man does?
It should be equally empowering if you assume that adult women are not children. Mainly I am just tired of prudery and the relationship police. Equality means exactly that. Let’s have women above the age of majority be treated as adults at all times, not exclusively only when it benefits them. That’ll make for a better world for all.
Launch Control
My next “smart” book: Space Vehicle Maneuvering, Propulsion, Dynamics and Control: A Textbook for Engineers by Ranjan Vepa.
That’s gonna be a hard one.
My Nec of the Woods
Given the abject failure of Gideon the Ninth and presumably the entirety of The Locked Tomb series, I really wish there were a good series with lesbian space necromancers.
Because that could be so much fun. Alas, and such.
Light It Up
By the by, if you want to read a good book about lighting, Motion Picture & Video Lighting for Cinematographers, Gaffers & Lighting Technicians by Blain Brown is very approachable and has great examples.
Muirderous
And her body was like the chrysolite.
Gideon the Ninth is such an incredibly terrible book. It’s one of the books I could only get 30 or so pages in before not continuing.
Obviously I cannot judge the entire work and never will be able to do so, but it was like if you took YA and dumbed it so very far down it was intended only for six-year-olds. And then for some reasons had necromancers talking like TikTok tweens.
It’s utter trash. Just a profoundly fetid piece of shit.
Sent
An artist retrospective: Montreal-born Jill Ciment’s memoir asks ‘Me Too?’ after the fact.
This is a better and more perceptive review than I was expecting it to be. I have not read (and probably will not read) Ciment’s book, but I like how Maltz Bovy does not go for the easy bien-pensant head-nodding along with current harmful strictures of how relationships “should” work.
It gets trickier once you factor in the newer, more questionable quasi-taboos. #MeToo has long since stopped being the of-the-moment fixation, but it has left its mark. Relationships between what would have once been deemed consenting adults now get picked apart for imperceptible or theoretical power imbalances. It’s squicky to meet someone at school or at work, even absent any supervisory capacities, because (supposedly) women find it threatening to be hit on, even by men who take no for an answer.
Facilitated by the existence of dating apps—that is, by the possibility of meeting someone only after vetting their willingness—we now have a generation increasingly convinced it’s weird and problematic to flirt with someone your own age, with whom there is no power imbalance, in a public space. A woman should be allowed to go to the supermarket without some man talking to her! (Never mind that most women will at some points in their lives want this sort of thing, or initiate it, even.) Age-gap discourse is not, in its current incarnation, particularly concerned with what would legally constitute statutory rape. Rather, it’s all about whether it’s a violation (of what? of whom?) for a 30-year-old to date a 50-year-old. #MeToo’s legacy is, in part, this proliferation of relationship categories that are a bit hmm, one that will soon enough encompass all potential love affairs.
What a great couple of paragraphs. In not that many words, she really shows how absolutely absurd the accepted discourse and conclusions are now. #MeToo, though it began for noble ends, caused and continues to cause quite a lot of harm to women. Like incels, many women have torpedoed their chances of happiness and then blamed others for their self-gestated problems.
I don’t want to detract from the work with my ranting. I’ll have more to say in other posts. But it is a good one; read it.
34
I’m reading 34 books right now. In the past, I’ve had many more going.
Toes
‘The Life Impossible’ by Matt Haig book review.
I love negative reviews! They are so rare these days. Ron Charles totally torches this rotten-sounding work. And I loved this line.
She’s apparently unharmed, but she starts experiencing everything around her with the super-heightened sensory perception of your extremely high college roommate who wants to tell you how miraculous his toes are.
Heh. That is a a very valuable service, preventing me from wasting my time reading something so putrescent.
Bit
I was reading that book below to start to find the answer to a specific question. It wasn’t in there as I think the work was too basic for what I want to know1 — but I did (obviously) think the quote was interesting. (And no, the answer is not on the internet.)
But I think I might be able to amble toward an answer in the next book up: Einstein’s Entanglement: Bell Inequalities, Relativity, and the Qubit, combined with some other works. Basically, I want to know that since the Bell inequalities are violated by quantum entanglement, could earlier-than-expected decohorence imply that there might be a lot of primordial black holes out there of microscopic size that we can’t “see” in the CMB data?
(Be vewwy vewwy quiet. I’m hunting dark matter.)
Shan
He’s right. For anyone working in or with AI — or for anyone in general — Murray Shanahan’s Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds should be required reading.
Terra Vestigo
I don’t feel that Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series was very successful, yet I think about it all the time. Not sure what that means but perhaps I should re-evaluate.
In the right hands, though, I posit that it could make a crackin’ good TV show.
Escapade
I quickly read L.D. Smithson’s The Escape Room. It’s not worth the minimal time. It’s as light as a feather and has no content to match its convictions. It never commits to anything. It’s ostensibly about a group of eight people forced to compete to the death in reality TV show while giving us a look at the relationship of an older, kind of overbearing sister to her younger, more easygoing sibling. However, the work never explores any o
f this satisfactorily and it neither examines the problems with the pigeonholing of the younger sister as “scatty” nor the horror of being essentially forced into almost-gladiatorial combat with seven other people.
It’s not clever, it’s not interesting and it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it horror? Is it family drama? Is it just plain drama? It’s never observant enough of human behavior or extreme enough to warrant any reaction. Both the book and all the characters in it are so milquetoast that you want to call the novel and all the people in it “Obama.” The book feels like it was written by a committee who had seen Fincher’s Se7en with all the good parts edited out combined with a binge of Golden Girls and Sex in the City.
The prose — well, let’s not talk about that.
I rarely encounter a bad book that I read all the way through, but this one I did. I wanted to see what happened when the two sisters finally had their big confrontation that the book should’ve been building to. And you know what happened? Not a damn thing. I guess I fooled myself because even that encounter was an anticlimactic waste of time.
Do not recommend.