swamp ophelia

I haven't posted about books in a very long time. So I have a lot of them to talk about, though I haven't had the energy to write up any deep thoughts about them, so these are the most surface-level thoughts possible.

+ Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley by Jacob Silverman. Audiobook. A solid entry in my tech overlords project. Depressing as hell.

+ Catwings by Ursula K. Le Guin. I was going to give the book to Lucas when he visited, so I wanted to read it first. I think it was chestnut_pod who said it's a nice little children's book that suddenly, out of nowhere, will have a sentence so beautiful that you're reminded that Le Guin wrote it. I probably wouldn't have been obsessed with these when I was a wee one because I hadn't discovered that I love cats yet, but I can imagine how large these books loom in the minds of tiny cat people!

+ End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. This is a very good book but it was undermined by the fact that a) I knew most of this stuff and b) I really wanted it to be more explicitly about how our tech overlords hate everything that makes us human. But those were me-problems. It's a very good book, as one expects from Klein.

+ On Vicious Worlds by Bethany Jacobs. Really enjoyed this one. It's rare to find a fantasy series that deals with how to do the hard work of building a community after the revolution has been won and everyone's traumatized. I thought it was unusually strong for the second book in a trilogy.

+ Finally, two years later, I finished The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Honestly, just dipping into this book now and then over the course of two entire years was an ideal way for me personally to read it. Because this book is all vibes. Like, yeah, there is a plot and there's...kind of worldbuilding. But it's really just about moving through gorgeous European locales, meeting interesting people, hunting for old documents, etc. And I really, really like it. As I said before: must a book be "good"? Is it not enough for it to have immaculate vibes?

I do think it majorly suffered from

showing the monster at the end. When we get Rossi's written testimony and hear from and "see" Dracula directly it...just becomes a little silly. I can think of ways in which Kostova could have communicated the plotty details of what she wanted there in just a few words from Rossi in a way that would have been chilling and kept up the momentum of the book.

But that was like thirty pages out of a 600 page book or whatever, so it's not THAT big of a complaint. Sometimes books just feel good to read.

+ Peril at End House by Agatha Christie. A Poirot I somehow hadn't ever read, even back in my middle school years when I read Poirot books by the dozens. Classic Christie in the sense that the twist makes perfect sense and you admire how she pulled it off.

+ The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow, the closest thing we have to a tech superhero. Audiobook. Loved this. Thought it was great. If you're looking for something to read about AI and how to live with it, this is a good one.

+ The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men by Jon Ronson. I think Ronson is not really a writer for me. He writes very compellingly and he has a knack for finding interesting people to talk to, but his analysis always seems pretty 101 to me. Which is probably fine for most people buying his books in an airport, but always leaves me going, "That's it?"

Where are the really good books about the masculinity crisis? Because as absolutely baffling as I find it, I do think the fact that men don't know what it means to be a man anymore is driving many of our societal problems right now. That and rising inequality are, imo, behind the rise of global fascism. As anyone who has been here a long time knows, I don't understand why anyone needs to know "how to be a man" or "how to be a woman"; why isn't "how to be a good human being" enough? But apparently it is not for many (most) people, and it's causing all kinds of problems, and I would like to read something about it by someone who is actually thoughtful and doesn't blame women and feminism. (Ronson doesn't really do the latter; he's just not insightful enough for my tastes.)

Anyway, this held my attention throughout because Ronson is a good writer, but I didn't take anything away from it, really.

+ Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. Audiobok. (Why did they not let Ben read this one? I've heard him on podcasts and his voice is FINE! I strongly believe that nonfiction audiobooks should be read by the author unless they have an actually bad voice. Like, if I was the author, no one would want to listen to me. But most people should get to read their own books.)

More tech overlords, more depressing. Very solid, though. More an intellectual portrait of the ideas that drive Musk than anything else, which I think is a good thing.

+ Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay. I have such a love/hate relationship with this man. I LOVE that he has the same obsession that I do: the multicultural, multi-religious world of the Mediterranean world from antiquity to the Renaissance. He just loves seeing people from different backgrounds run into each other and try to navigate it. He loves the mixing of cities and the meeting of cultures! As do I!

But I don't think he writes women well. They're always beautiful. They're always all inexplicably in love with the main male character. Like, they're also very smart and strong, but somehow they feel more like Smart and Strong Women than actual characters. Though I guess the men don't always feel that much like actual characters either? Characters aren't his strong suit. It just bothers me more in the women.

This one was set in his fantasy version of late medieval France, which honestly is far less interesting to me than Byzantium, Al-Andalus, etc. in his other books, so I was already predisposed not to be as into this one. And I found his prose more annoying--there were so many sentence fragments leaving out the subject, and it just felt weird and stilted. That would have been one thing if it was just the internal voice of one specific character in the ensemble, but it carried over to the other povs too, so I found it annoying.

But I do still enjoy his books. And I absolutely adore when he makes subtle references to his other books in a way that really rewards people who have read all his books. It's just such a joy!

I need to make peace with the fact that he's never again going to write a book I enjoy as much as The Lions of Al-Rassan or even the Sarantium books. But I still find him worth reading.

+ The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O'Sullivan. Audiobook. This neurologist writes about what we might call "psychosomatic" illnesses with compassion and insight. The book is repetitive, but she's really, really trying to drive home the fact that just because symptoms are caused by something psychological, that doesn't mean that the symptoms aren't real. People are really suffering. These illness are as real as any other kind. I deeply appreciate that.

One thing I wish she'd explored a little more is her theory that the scripts that we form for ourselves, the narratives we create in our own minds, can trap us, and that sometimes pathologizing emotions through assigning mental illness labels to them can do us a disservice. I think that's true, but I'd like to dig more into it because I also think that those kinds of labels can be very helpful to people sometimes. Perhaps she talks about this in her other books?

+ Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs by Anthony Beevor. Audiobook. I basically just picked this one at random out of the audiobooks that were available at the moment. In my layperson's opinion, this was a pretty solid blow-by-blow of how this guy affected the Romanovs and their decline. You don't get much of a sense of who he is as a person (other than a lech who loves power), but that's not really the point: the point is his political role.

My favorite part of the book was learning something about the religious atmosphere of the Russian Empire at the time. I'd be happy to read more about that at some other point.

+ The Humans by Matt Haige. Read for book club. This was fine! Enjoyable enough on a surface level, kept my attention, but was kind of too "hetero romantic and parental love makes us human!" for my tastes. Some very fun scenes, especially early on. Not nearly as insightful into human nature as it thinks it is. Would have made for a very good three or five episode British tv show.

+ American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy by Bradley Onishi. Audiobook. I haven't listened to Straight White American Jesus much over the past year or so, but it was nice to hear Brad's voice again (although sans awkward dad jokes and bantering with Dan, which I really missed). As always, Brad is one of the few people out there who I think is paying enough attention to how the religious right has morphed over the course of the 21st century; so many people think it's still what it was in the 90s with the Moral Majority and everything, and it's just not. Things have changed so much in ways that get missed.

I appreciated that he really dove into how the link between the religious right and our tech overlords is how authoritarian and anti-democratic they are. They really think that certain people are better than everyone else and deserve to have power. Terrifying!

+ A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett. Another solid entry in the Ana and Din series. These are just good, old-fashioned fun with a bunch of weird plants mixed in. I was tickled, though, that I kept wanting to nudge some invisible co-reader and go, "Gee, do you think Bennett is a vegetarian?" Like chestnut_pod says, subtlety is not this man's strong point. But really original worldbuilding is, and I will continue to read this series as long as it stays this level of good. As far as I'm concerned, he can write a hundred more of these books.

+ Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made by Kristin Kobes du Mez. Audiobook. God, she's such a superstar. Every bit as strong and important as Jesus and John Wayne. I got recognition shock over and over again reading this book and I'm so glad that Du Mez is the one who decided to take the social history of evangelical women seriously. Recommended for sure.

Dear author:

Hello and happy Yuletide! Thanks for choosing one of my fandoms and thanks in advance for the story! I always find that the writing is the most enjoyable, rewarding part of Yuletide and I hope you feel the same way.

( details here )



( The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion )

( Seventy-Two Letters )

( 손 : The Guest (TV) )

( The Great Escape )

( The Vast of Night )

( Tam Lin )

( Summers at Castle Auburn )

+ The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett (audiobook):

I know it's crazy to say "everyone should read this book" about a 720-page book, but everyone should read this book? I'm sure there are some things that are outdated since it was published back in 2009, but it's such a good resource for understanding how new diseases arise, global health, how and why it's underfunded, why that's dangerous, and what we could theoretically do about it if we were more concerned with human life and less concerned with maintaining global capitalism. (Also I feel like it put Covid in context for me. I repeat what I said: we got lucky that that was the strain that took off. It could have been so much worse.)

That said, it is intensely frustrating because we could pretty easily solve many global health crises, but we refuse to do it because it would cost too much money in the short term EVEN THOUGH IT WOULD SAVE MONEY IN THE LONG TERM. Humans are so short-sighted! And incentivized to be so by our economic structure! We try to "manage" problems instead of fixing them, throwing money in a panic at things after they've snowballed instead of going back to the root of the problem, fixing that, and saving money and lives long-term.

Garrett would relate a story about how an earnest but almost-unfunded clinic in sub-Saharan Africa or post-Soviet Russia/Central Asia would use syringes over and over and over again to vaccinate kids and end up spreading something like AIDS, and I would have to go lie down. If we just made sure that all healthcare facilities in the world had enough syringes, that would not happen! If we actually funded public health facilities in the US, then medication-resistant forms of diseases would not emerge! If we stopped chopping down millions of square miles of rainforest, previously unknown pathogens carried by animals and insects would not bring new diseases to human beings! If we funded watchdog groups, we could shut down new diseases before they arise! If we realized that pathogens know no political borders, we could protect all of humanity!

We absolutely have the knowledge and tools to extend and save lives and protect each other. We could do it. We just refuse to because of money and lack of "political will." It's so distressing.

Anyway, back to the review: I am not at all a STEM person, but Garrett does such an incredible job explaining things that I felt like I had a baseline understanding of just about everything she was trying to tell me, which is a real achievement. There was only one spot late in the game (at about 89%-94%) where my eyes started to glaze over, but that didn't last long. Garrett sure did deserve that Pulitzer.

+ The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything by Kathryn Jezer-Morton (audiobook)

I listened to an interesting audiobook this weekend called The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. It’s basically the way that social media has narrowed and warped the way we craft narratives about our own lives, which is something that doesn’t get talked about enough, imo. I recommend the book!

I liked all of it, but one thing that really stuck out to me was the exploration of “flat narratives” and how marginalized/invisible they are in our culture. The author tied them specifically to people who have a disability or a chronic illness, which I think is dead on, but she and I both think they have wider applicability. She also pulled in Le Guin’s carrier bag theory, too, which I appreciated.

Talking explicitly about what narratives are available to us is really important, and I wished she’d at least alluded to the ways in which queer and genderqueer people are the source of most alternative narratives in our culture, since we figure out early on that many narratives do not apply to us and we have to create different ones. It was quite a straight book, which is fair enough as the author is straight, and so are the majority of people, but it would have been nice to talk a bit more about non-normative narratives.

But yeah, this was an accessible beginning to a really important conversation.

+ The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman (audiobook)

So I liked this quite a bit for what it was, but what it was is not what it claimed to be.

What it claims to be (through its title, copy, marketing, and introduction): a primer on how to spread radical ideas and affect real change.

What it actually is (as revealed through reading the book itself): a series of vignettes of moments where new, radical ideas were beginning to spread through innovative use of new technology.

The vignettes were great! And the technology was wide-ranging, from letters to petitions to manifestos to zines to Twitter to Discord. All were built around one or a handful of interesting historical (or contemporary) figures and were very well-researched. Beckerman made the potentially controversial but (I think) correct decision to write about people espousing all kinds of radical ideas, both good ones and bad ones. So we get Chartism and riot grrrls and Covid epidemiologists alongside the Italian Futurists and the Alt Right. And a lot of these moments of historical unrest either don't quite work or never really get off the ground.

My favorite chapters were definitely the ones about the African Morning Post newspaper and the one about samizdat (self-published, hand-typed publications) in the Soviet Union, both of which are worth the price of admission, imo. I am not sure whether the historical (by which I mean pre-21st century) chapters are really stronger than the second half or if I was just more interested in them because I am me.

But while I do think there are things to learn from these vignettes, this is not a book that is really providing practical applications or even high-level principles for change. It's not a manual of "lessons learned from past movements that we can use in our own moments," alas.

The lessons I drew from it are these:

1. It takes years or decades of people laying the groundwork of new ideas before those new ideas filter out enough to reach the wider culture.

2. Real, substantive change takes time. And it will face rollbacks, and defeats, and you have to just try again and again and again. Something I already knew, but it's always good to be reminded.

3. Technologies (widely defined) are not neutral but have characters which shape how they can be used and even shape their users, for good and ill. (Shades of McLuhan.)

4. Social media is a very, very bad way of actually organizing. It can stir up emotion, which is important, but that's entirely insufficient if you actually want change.

5. There are always people everywhere who are fighting for change, even when it seems impossible.

So yeah. Worth engaging with if you go in with the right expectations. Maybe read the actual book, though--I will never get over the narrator's complete failure to deliver riot grrrl zine quotes.

+ Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow (audiobook)

Another book you wish you could make everyone read. I was familiar with a lot of these arguments from reading Cory's blog on and off, but it's so very nice to have them all in one place, clearly explained, and in support of his larger thesis. He's so good at explaining tech-y things in ways that anyone can understand, which is such an underrated skill.

Basically, it's an explainer for why all tech has started to suck. It's sooooo gooooood.

And now for some brief words on fiction:

+ These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs:

What a fun space opera! This definitely had its flaws, but I had a blast. Fun worldbuilding, fun characters, it's very clear that the writer is Jewish lol. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy, and I can do that right away because it's all published! Bonus points to this book for name-checking Becca in the acknowledgements. I am always so delighted when I'm reading a speculative fiction novel from the past five or so years and there's Becca's name in the acknowledgments! It happens with surprising frequency!

+ Death Has Deep Roots: A Second World War Mystery by Michael Gilbert

A solid Golden Age mystery novel where the past is haunting the present. I love how it deals with the aftermath of WWII and how that time still affects all the characters. It's built around a court case, but several people are off investigating to find more information while the court case is unfolding, which adds some nice tension. Like with Death in Captivity, there's a certain kind of weight to Gilbert's writing where the deaths feel like they matter, which I appreciate. I need to read more of his work.

+ Translation State by Ann Leckie

I liked this a lot but I didn't love. I am very into it being a stand-alone novel (though it's set in her wider fictional universe), that it's really weird, and that it felt unique. I somehow didn't feel as invested in the characters as I wish I had (especially since one of them is a middle-aged woman just starting to live life on her own terms, which is a favorite trope of mine), but it was well-paced and interesting throughout. I will read more Leckie at some point! She's just such a good writer!

(As an aside, it's got the most unique take on arranged-marriage-mutual-pining I've ever seen.)

Remember that time I went to Colonial Williamsburg to research a fic? I actually wrote that fic! And had a blast doing it!

​

Title: with the sun in my eyes
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Pitt (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Wordcount: 11,905
Warnings:  No Archive Warnings Apply 
Relationships: Melissa “Mel” King/Frank Langdon
Characters: Melissa “Mel” King, Frank Langdon, Mel King’s family 
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Colonial Williamsburg, Nerd4Nerd, Period Costumes, more importantly: period hats, the embarrassment of wearing the same t-shirt as everyone else in your grade on a field trip, too much information about 18th century craftsmanship, felicity is the best american girl fight me, melissa “mel” king is very lonely, Autistic Melissa “Mel” King, Appalachian Frank Langdon, Virginian Melissa “Mel” King, this is extremely cheesy, You Have Been Warned
Summary:

“Whoa! Your dress is so cool!”

Mel jumped at the sound of the loud voice. A boy was standing just to her right, a giant grin on his face, and—was he talking to her? She stared at him, at his sweaty, floppy hair; at his lime-green t-shirt that read East McDowell Middle School in blocky white letters; at the weird dent in his chin. He was clearly a couple of years older than her, old enough that she was surprised he was talking to a girl at all, much less her. The older middle school boys at her church avoided the girls like the plague and always sat on the other side of the classroom during Sunday school. She couldn’t remember the last time an older boy had voluntarily spoken to her.

But this boy didn’t seem put off by her silent gaping. He just bounced where he stood, arms swinging by his sides, and asked, “Where’d you get it?”

It came out more like whuhrdj’gettit and his eyes were so blue they were almost scary, but he looked like he really wanted to know. So she swiped at the tear tracks on her face with the back of her hand and offered, “I got it for my birthday. It’s Felicity’s.”

“Yeah? Who’s she?”

Wow! Most of my experiences of a book resonating with me so deeply that I'm practically vibrating--where I have to slow down and draw out the reading experience--where I know from the first chapter that the book is going to change the way I see the world--are reserved for fiction. I was not expecting to find it in a nonfiction book I found by chance while scrolling through the recently added audiobooks filter on Libby.

But this book articulated so many things I've instinctively felt but previously had no language for around the topic of mental health even as it taught me things I didn't know at all. Khameer Kidia draws on his experiences as a kid growing up in Zimbabwe, a college- and then medical student and then resident in the US, a medical practitioner and researcher and anthropologist in both countries, and a deeply compassionate human being wherever he goes to explain why we have a global mental health crisis, how it manifests differently depending on context, how we have tried and failed to treat it, and what it might really take to promote mental wellbeing for everyone.

It's way too simplistic to say "capitalism was the villain all along!" even though…that's kind of true? But this book doesn't read like a tankie Bluesky screed against some vaguely defined idea of capitalism; instead, it's a thoughtful examination of the ways in which colonialism, imperialism, and the hoarding of wealth by the powerful create a world so difficult to live in that of course people struggle.

Kidia doesn't deny that there are chemicals in the brain that can affect how we feel and operate or that certain medications can help people. But he views mental wellbeing as a holistic part of both individual and communal life that's deeply rooted in people's lived experiences, the support systems they have or don't have, and the way systemic hierarchies affect everything. He's not afraid to come right out and say, "This person probably has (what the Global North calls) severe depression because they don't know how they're going to feed their family tonight, and if you give them money, they will get better." And then backs it up with research that proves that sometimes money is the actual solution.

He's also very respectful of indigenous treatments for mental distress, not in a woo-woo kind of way, but because of an understanding that communities have created mechanisms over generations to make people feel more rooted, secure, and supported and that, when practiced in the context of the communities that created them, these can be as effective as medication or CBT or anything else that Western medicine promotes. I am famously allergic to woo, but this balanced approach seems very wise to me (and also helped me realize that I mostly hate woo because it's usually white people appropriating practices that belong to other cultures that only work within the context of those cultures, not because of those practices themselves. As usual, context is everything).

Throughout, the book is engaging, operating on multiple levels as diagnosis of a global health problem, multiple case studies both long-term (his mother) and short-term (patients he saw for a single appointment), a critique of colonialism, a sort of microhistory of the last fifty years of Zimbabwe's history, and a memoir of his own growth both as someone who experiences mental distress and someone who treats it.

I don't tend to enjoy memoir, and when a writer mixes personal experiences with cultural criticism or historical narrative, it usually doesn't work for me. But Kidia is an incredible writer in addition to being a skilled anthropologist and a caring doctor, and the way he uses the experiences of his family members, his patients, and his country in this book is really masterful. Moving backwards and forwards through time, talking about how colonialism affected both his parents and the country he grew up in, contrasting life and expectations and values in the US with Zimbabwe--he's weaving so many threads together that a less talented writer and thinker would have surely dropped a few or at least created troublesome tangles. But he carried me right through to the very end.

David Graeber (forgive me! I'm a caricature of myself!) popularized the slogan "freedom and care" as a way of describing the animating principle of anarchism. I don't quite consider myself an anarchist, despite how much anarchic thought has influenced me, but "freedom and care" are ideals I strive to live by. This book is an articulation of what happens when care is subjected to a market economy that doesn't actually care about it and where the burden for providing care falls disproportionately on under- or unpaid women, particularly black and brown women--and where that market economy creates entire societies that are leeching the resources and labor from other, poorer societies.

Kidia's prescriptions are a) redistribute wealth globally because humanity is an interconnected web, b) prioritize autonomy and dignity for those who are dealing with mental distress (this is where the "freedom" part comes in), and c) find treatments--from mutual aid to indigenous spiritual rituals to group houses to community aid workers--that work for the specific community you're working in. Things don't always translate across cultures or even across cities. One-size-fits-all solutions both do not work and also fundamentally misunderstand how people actually live in the world.

As is typical when I come across a book written by someone who is a keen-eyed observer of the problems of society but also works hard to care for those he can, I came away both discouraged and encouraged. The scale of the problem is huge. But economic eras wane, new ways of organizing ourselves emerge if we work hard enough, and change is always possible.

Protip: read the appendices first. Even if you listen to the audiobook. He talks a lot about language and why he uses the words he uses and I think it's really helpful in understanding his project.

What I finished:

+ Listened to More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker.

WHAT A BANGER! I anticipated that this would be about how fucked up our tech overlords' worldviews are from a moral and public policy perspective, and that certainly played a large part in it. But it ended up being more about why they're wrong about the very tech they're hyping--why the claims they make are not actually possible given, like, physics and the nature of the universe. Which is not an angle I'd seen explored before, and I would have expected it to all be over my head. But Becker is absolutely fantastic at explaining complicated tech and science-y things in a way that I could understand--at least enough to know that these Silicon Valley guys are full of shit.

The moral arguments are woven into all of this; Becker has a lovely humanist approach to the world and a deep appreciation for the humanities. He's clearly repulsed by the perspectives and priorities of the people who are running our digital world (and, increasingly, our physical one as well), so I felt safe in his hands. I often feel alienated from STEM subjects both because math doesn't come easily to me and because the current discourse around it seems so anti-human to me. But Becker reminded me that there's really no boundary between the humanities and STEM and that if you appreciate both, you better serve whichever one you're focused on. Life, nature, the universe is one interwoven textile and needs to be understood as such.

The more I learn about the decision-making class in Silicon Valley, the more I believe that they hate all the things that make us human--art, care, struggle, nature, bodies, again, death, humility, the mutuality of relationships. All of these people are absolutely terrified of death and yet, if they did succeed in their (futile) endeavors to live forever, what would they do with all that time? They're certainly not investing in learning about the world as it is or getting to know other people or creating beautiful things or just enjoying nature. So what would be the point of living forever? They have no answer to this and if they weren't doing such terrible, terrible things to our society and nature, I would feel profound pity for them. As it is, I'm just angry. It's baffling to me that we allow the most morally vacuous people in the world to make consequential decisions about the fate of humanity.

My one complaint is that I wish Becker had read the book himself. Judging by his new podcast Dreaming Against the Machine, he's got the voice for it, and I always, always prefer to have the writer read the book if it's possible. The guy who read it did fine, but there's just no replacing the personality of a writer.

+ Read The House of the Patriarch, the 18th Benjamin January series. You may ask yourself, "Is 18 simply too many books in this series?" And the answer is "NO!!!!" There can never be too many books in this series!

For those of you who are new to my favorite currently-being-written series of books: these historical mysteries follow Benjamin January, a free man of color, in 1830s-40s New Orleans and beyond. The mysteries are good, but they're really an excuse to explore Ben's world: the complicated and colorful people he knows and loves and fears and hates, the vivid and singular and meticulously-researched world of antebellum New Orleans. These are books about power and oppression, about resisting it and not being able to resist it, about building relationships with people who are very different than you are, about how those relationships are really the only thing worth anything in a world of darkness and cruelty. I love them with all my heart.

This is one of the not-in-New Orleans books; Ben is searching for a young white woman who disappeared in upstate New York's "burnt over district" in a time of weird religious groups. A favorite topic of mine! My first thought was, "We're going to get a Joseph Smith cameo!" but no, we're a few years after he left for Illinois, so while he's mentioned a time or two he does not show up. The historical cameo we do get is much more unexpected and made me laugh. The cameos are always such a fun part of the not-in-New-Orleans books, and Hambly's writing is grounded enough that Ben never quite turns into the Forrest Gump of the antebellum US (and Mexico and Cuba and France and wherever else he goes!).

The mystery itself is engaging--I was very invested in Eve Russell, who became one of my favorite one-off characters--and, as usual, Hambly makes fantastic use of a period of American history that doesn't get a lot of fictional attention. I especially appreciated that palpable danger that the non-white characters were in even in ostensibly "free" New York--there are traffickers everywhere just waiting to capture free black people and sell them into slavery down south. No one can breathe easy because everyone is in danger all the time. Of all the fictional media I've encountered, this series as a body of work is one of the best at communicating the totality of the chattel slavery system--how it affected every single thing about life for black people, every moment of every day. How no one was ever, ever safe and how hard people had to fight for even the relative safety that a few were able to find. How it tainted the whole society, how it curdled souls. I always come away with an understanding of just why the Civil War had to happen, why the abolitionist movement probably never would have succeeded without violence. Slavery had to be ripped out at the roots.

Anyway, since we weren't in New Orleans, I missed Rose and Hannibal and Livia and Dominique and Shaw and Olympe and everybody back home, but we did get some excellent Chloe scenes, which are always a bonus! (Chloe!!!) As usual, I spent the whole book going, "When will Ben get to go home? When will he get to have a bath and a good meal and a full night's sleep and see his wife and children???" because nobody whumps their main character the way Hambly does.

But somehow no matter how dark the subject matter of these books are, they never make me feel hopeless. Heavy with the reminder of all the things that people do to each other, yes, but also fiercely grateful for all the ways we find to take care of each other. Gah, I love these books!

+ Listened to Culture Creep by Alice Bolin, a collection of essays at the intersection of feminism and pop culture. Your degree of enjoyment will depend largely on how willing you are to read personal essays that dive deep into things that most people would say "it's not that deep" about (Animal Crossing, wellness tracking, teen magazines, the Playboy Mansion). Most people's eyes would probably glaze over, and honestly I'm not sure if I would have kept up with this if I was reading it, but listening to it while working was enjoyable enough. I don't care for memoir as a genre unless the writer is really freaking fantastic, so when things are too person, I tend to check out, but this managed to be rooted enough in the texts themselves for me to never do that, and Bolin has some really sharp insights throughout. All in all a fine audiobook experience.


What I'm currently reading:

+ Listening to God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn. Well this is a unique book! It's philosophy and technology all tangled up together, at once personal and universal, about the past and the future, meaning and consciousness and nature. O'Gieblyn is incredibly smart and the book is very challenging in a way I appreciate. I also appreciate that she grew up fundamentalist and went to a Bible college before becoming an atheist; there's this one moment where she talks about how a process that took society centuries of bloody struggle (moving from Christian to secular societies) is something that those of us who were raised in rightwing Christianity have to do on our own in the course of a few years, and I have never heard anyone talk about it that way. But yeah, it's really hard to go from "the world is 6,000 years old" to "the universe is billions of years old" and all that those things imply in a short period of time! It's a lot for an individual human being, and she does an incredible job of evoking the disruption of that and also how things linger even when you don't want them to.

+ Reading Hunting Shadows by Charles Todd, 16th in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series of historical mysteries. This series is set in the UK just after WWI and has a shell-shocked Scotland Yard inspector as its protagonist. These are suitably engaging and twisty mysteries for when that's what I want. They kind of all blur together in my head, but that's fine--I don't need everything to be Benjamin January. I don't like cozy mysteries, and these are not, but they also don't lean too far into the gritty darkness either. It's a good balance, well written, and I continue to enjoy this series as I dip in and out of it.