Story! A Shaky Bridge

Aug. 1st, 2025 09:38 pm
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[personal profile] sonia
A Shaky Bridge by Marissa Lingen, [personal profile] mrissa. New medical technology, plus capitalism. We all know what could go wrong, and maybe we know some ways it could be made right again.

A bridge too far

Aug. 1st, 2025 01:41 pm
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[personal profile] mrissa
 New story out today in Clarkesworld: A Shaky Bridge ! This one is more directly referential to current events than most of my science fiction, while also drawing on my experience with my dad having strokes. So this is not the most happy-clappy upbeat story I've ever written...but it is one that I feel good about having out there, and I hope you'll like it too.
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[personal profile] sovay
It doesn't sound like much to call a movie the most important film about the Holocaust to come out of wartime Hollywood. Once you get past the handful of outliers headed by Lubitsch, the bar is in hell, baking bagels. The Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations did not pull in the crowds in Peoria. Thanks to the combined filtration of the Production Code Administration and the Office of War Information, even films that engage with the ideologies rather than the aesthetics of Nazism can start to feel as thin on Tinseltown ground as a minyan in Sodom. I don't know what else to call None Shall Escape (1944), a Columbia B-effort that does not play like any other American propaganda of my experience. It plays like a pre-Code at the height of World War II, a crash-in from some parallel dream factory with far less need to cushion the reality shock of genocide or the humanity that commits it. It's harsh, cheap, uncannily unstuck in time. Nothing in the literature has knocked me for such a loop since Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls (1966).

In part it is a study of a kind I had not thought popularly available until the publication of Adorno et al.'s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a case history of terminal Nazification. The film isn't subtle, but neither is it stupid. The age of onset is World War I. To the small and oft-annexed town of Lidzbark, it made no difference for years that their schoolteacher was ethnically German, especially since the culturally Polish community around him was territorially Prussian at the time, but in the demobbed spring of 1919, as the restoration of Poland and the breaking of Germany rest on the same table at Versailles, it matters fiercely to Alexander Knox's Wilhelm Grimm. He greets his homecoming ironically, cautiously: "You're very generous to an enemy." It would go over better without his newfangled Aryan hauteur. It marks him out more than his soldier's greatcoat or his self-conscious limp, this damage he's taken beyond shell-shock, into conspiracy theory that horrifies his long-faithful fiancée of Marsha Hunt's Marja Paciorkowski all the more for the earnestness with which he expects her to share it. Disability and defeat have all twisted up for him into the same embittered conviction of betrayal, all the riper for the consolation of the Dolchstoßlegende, the romantic nationalism of Lebensraum, the illusion of Völkisch identity as an unalterable fact to cling to in a world of broken bodies and promises where even the home front is no longer where he left it. "You don't understand. Nothing's the same anymore . . . The future lies in victory, not in freedom." Like an illness that protects itself, even as his nascent fascism kills his romance deader than any disfigurement, it feeds his hurt back into the seamless cycle of grievance and justification until his frustration finds itself a suitably inappropriate outlet—raping a smitten student to revenge the slur of his jilting on his Teutonic manhood. More than proto-Nazisploitation, the assault seals his willingness to take out his insecurities on the innocent. By the time the action rolls around to Munich in 1923, it suspends no disbelief to find him serving a comfortable six months for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch. By 1934, he's a decorated Alter Kämpfer, a veteran of the Reichstag fire and the Night of the Long Knives, a full oak-leaved SS-Gruppenführer who can turn his own brother over to the Gestapo without a blush and effectively abduct his nephew into the Hitler Youth; in short, exactly the sort of proper party man whom the seizure of Poland in 1939 should return to Lidzbark in the sick-joke-made-good plum role of Reichskommissar. Technically quartered in Poznań, he can't miss the chance to grind the supremacy of the Reich personally into the faces of the "village clowns" who last saw their schoolmaster fleeing in disgrace. "The best," he remarks pleasantly over his plenitude of coffee and brandy, the likes of which his silent, captive hosts have not seen in war-straitened weeks, "and not enough of it." He has already presided over a book-burning and the filming of a newsreel of propaganda, a casually cruel calling card. All the rest of the Generalplan Ost can wait until the morning.

None Shall Escape would be historically impressive enough if it merely, seriously traced the process by which an unexceptional person could accumulate a catalogue of atrocities that would sound like anti-German propaganda if they had not already been documented as standard operating procedures of the Third Reich. Concentration camps in their less crematory aspects were old news since 1933. The 1970's did not invent the Wehrmachtsbordelle. Knox ghosts on his German accent after a few lines, but it doesn't mar his performance that could once again come off like a national metonym and instead makes a mesmeric awful object of a man accelerating through moral event horizons like a railgun, never once given the easy out of psychopathology—in a screen niche dominated by brutes, fools, and sadists, the demonstrably intelligent, emotionally layered Wilhelm who has outsourced his conscience to his Führer stands out like a memo from Arendt. The political detailing of his descent is equally noteworthy and particularly acute in its insistence on a ladder of dreadful choices rather than irresistible free-fall, but I can get nuanced Nazis elsewhere in Hollywood if I need them. I can't get the eleven o'clock shocker of this picture which feels like a correction of the record, not a first-generation entry in that record itself. It goes farther than uncensored acknowledgement of what no wartime production would call the Shoah, remarkable already in light of official directives not to dramatize even the known extent of Nazi antisemitism unduly. Shot in the late summer into fall of 1943, it is the earliest film I have seen in my life to show that the Jews fought.

Horses are more important than Jews, that's all. )

It was not clairvoyance, even if None Shall Escape often gives the impression of working just ahead of the rim of history. Its Oscar nomination for Best Original Motion Picture Story was shared between the German and Austrian Jewish refugees of Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than, who had brought their respective border-crossing experiences to Hollywood—Neumann had even been born in Lidzbark when it was still German Lautenburg. Director Andre de Toth was Hungarian and, for a change, not Jewish, but his very late exit from occupied Europe had gifted him with a disturbing, exceptional qualification to treat the subject of Nazi atrocities on screen: caught in Warsaw when the balloon went up, he had been pressed into service in Nazi propaganda. One of the sickest, most pungent details in the movie is the Theresienstadt-like newsreel of a queue of desperately smiling townsfolk to whom the Nazis dispense a largesse of bread and soup which is snatched from their mouths the second the cameras stop rolling, the rabbi himself unceremoniously jerked from the line he was originally forced into so as not to spoil the picture of placid, grateful Poles with a Jew. It was de Toth's recreation of an incident it had shamed him so much to participate in that he spoke of it only toward the end of his life, hiding its ghost until then in the plain sight of the silver screen. Did he lend his piratical eyepatch to the wounded Wilhelm for the same reason, like Pressburger's stolen memories to Karl Braun? Who among this émigré crew had seen the loading of a night train bound to the east? The closeness to reality of this film is a double edge. Wrapped in its near-future frame of a post-war, Nuremberg-style trial in whose hindsight all these horrors are supposed to be safely past and in the process of redress, None Shall Escape locks itself into uncertainty because it knows, as its more sanitized age-mates do not have to, that when the lights come up the trains are still running on time. It can't close the loop of its own title. When all the testimonies have concluded in the case of Wilhelm Grimm, Reich Commissioner of Western Poland, charged in the absence of a definition of genocide with the "unspeakable miseries" of "the wanton extermination of human life," the notably international tribunal does not pronounce sentence: it turns the future over to the audience. The verdict is left to the fourth wall to render as a line of Allied flags flutters expectantly as if over the as yet unimagined headquarters of the UN. Like a lost soul stripped of everything but the doctrine that cost him it all, Wilhelm screamed out his die-hard Reich-dream straight to us: "You've just won another battle in a fight which has not ended . . . You cannot crush us! We will rise again and again!" In a more recognizable war movie, his cry would be the impotence of defeat, but in this one? Is he right? Is there such a thing as justice for crimes against humanity? Is it enough to keep us from churning out more conspiratorial ideologies, more genocidal wars? It isn't spellmaking, it's a thought experiment so suddenly, darkly reflective that if Technician Fourth Grade Rod Serling hadn't been in boot camp with the rest of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment at the time of production, I'd blame him for a hand in its black mirror. If I shake it under the present world-historical conditions, the magic eight-ball seems to be coming up SOL. Do I need to state that this picture commercially flopped?

I got this one out of the Criterion Channel's Noir and the Blacklist and while I could argue with the first categorization, the second was an indisputable hat trick: Marsha Hunt, Alexander Knox, and screenwriter Lester Cole, the card-carrying Communist of the Hollywood Ten. Sucks to McCarthy, it can be readily watched on YouTube and the Internet Archive and even to my surprise obtained on Sony Pictures Blu-Ray. DP Lee Garmes does his low-key considerable best to compensate for a budget like Samuel Bischoff turned the couch upside down and shook it for change and a moth flew out. The precise art direction of Lionel Banks does the same for a Western set that needs to be in Poland. I am afraid that after catching the back-to-back breadth of his shape-changing in The Sea Wolf (1941) and None Shall Escape, it is unlikely that I will ever again be reasonable on the subject of Alexander Knox, especially as he is performing here one of those high-wire acts that can't once glance down at the actor's vanity for reassurance or out to the audience for sympathy, but Hunt matches him so intensely and effortlessly over their quarter-century of meeting like a marriage on the wrong side of the mirror, somewhere off in the forking paths of alternate film history they should have been less inimically reteamed. "There's your Weimar Republic for you." Of course I don't need to reach back into 1919 or even 1944 to find a Wilhelm, but it matters to have the reminder of a Rabbi Levin. We will outlive them. This choice brought to you by my free backers at Patreon.

The heat broke!

Aug. 1st, 2025 09:10 am
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[personal profile] oracne
We had some big thunderstorms Thursday afternoon and the heat seems to have broken for now. Although humid, it was in the mid-sixties Farenheit this morning when I did my jog. I have opened windows!

On my jog, I have occasionally, rarely, had a male observer yell something catcall-y from a car or whatever, but this morning, I got a solemn thumbs up from a middle-aged woman whose car was stopped at the light, and a smile from a younger woman jogging the opposite direction while I was doing my cooldown walk. That was really nice.

Oh thank goodness, it's storming

Aug. 2nd, 2025 10:15 pm
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[personal profile] conuly
This should drop the temperature to something livable.

E and I watched three more Voyager episodes.

First, we watched the one where Tom Paris gets put in solitary for 30 days due to an environmental crime of conscience. Janeway flipped her morning coin and landed on "martinet / asshole", I guess. Tom tries pointing out that a month of solitary is cruel and unusual punishment, but nobody, least of all the writers, takes it seriously.

I take it seriously. This is literally torture. The worst thing that happens to Tom is he's bored and has a few nightmares about his astonishingly abusive father. (I thought the man was astonishingly abusive. I'll bet the writers thought he was just ordinary bad.) What happens to real people includes but is not limited to hallucinations, obsessive thoughts, a heightened risk of suicide, and lasting psychosis.

Anyway, the episode was surprisingly still topical, 30-ish years after the fact. The one moderately amusing part of this episode is where Tom tells the turbolift to bring him to the brig because nobody wanted to pay the security guard extras to speak. Great episode, but, to reiterate, solitary confinement is literally torture.

The next episode was Counterpoint, in which a fascist thug thinks he has culture, but actually he does not. They never do. Voyager is smuggling telepathic refugees. The fascists have some inane argument about how you can't trust telepaths and they're a real and present threat to society, but it's a weaksauce argument and nobody buys it. Outside the ship children are getting smuggled around in crates and incarcerated in concentration camps everywhere you look. This is another surprisingly, and dismayingly, topical episode.

At the end, Janeway is sad that the thug betrayed them instead of defecting for real, but that's because she thinks he's hot. I think she could've just kidnapped him. It worked with Seven, after all. (To be honest, there's a long list of one-episode characters that I think Janeway should've outright kidnapped. And also Seska and her baby.)

One of those refugee children shows up again on Prodigy as a Starfleet security guard and... honestly, I have so many questions about the way they apparently jaunt back and forth to the Delta Quadrant on a whim nowadays. Is this something they explain in Picard? Because I'm not watching Picard, not now that I've heard they kill off Icheb.

And today was a Robert Picardo Showcase Episode wherein the Doctor has a psychological crisis after finding out his memory was modified to make him forget his previous psychological crisis, when he chose to save his friend Harry over some random extra. It's a good episode. Don't ask me what Voyager planned to do if he never overcame his trauma and they had to go the rest of the trip with no doctor, though.

*****************


Read more... )
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[personal profile] landofnowhere
Musical Chairs, Amy Poeppel. Recommended by Ask A Manager; I liked Small Admissions by the same author, which was also recommended there. I didn't like this one quite as much; I suspect that's partly because Poeppel had experience in private school admissions, but not the classical music world, and also partly because of the larger cast of characters making it less focused. But it was still enjoyable and hard to put down!

It's basically a pastoral comedy -- a group of family and friends spend their summer in small-town Connecticut, learn things about themselves and their relationships, and end up romantically paired off at the end. It's having lots of fun with that, and also with its multi-perspective storytelling; at one point we get the POV of a character who has just arrived from New York City, doesn't know anyone, and is like, "wow, these rich Connecticut people are all super weird". The classical music angle didn't really do much for me (but also I am not a musician, just a fan). One thing I realized after finishing the book is that it's a fairly white book; or at least all of the major cast members are white or unspecified race. This is made more noticeable by the fact that there are a few Asian-American characters with walk-on parts or brief mentions, to represent the younger generation of classical performers who are even better than our protagonists; but we don't get their story. Though I do appreciate that this is a book that spends most of the time with characters who are 50 or older.

PSA

Jul. 31st, 2025 08:13 pm
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[personal profile] conuly
What even is this fucking bullshit

Go leave a public comment, though I don't even know what to say. "This is garbage and you know it, and you're bad and should feel bad", maybe.

Katabasis, by R. F. Kuang

Jul. 31st, 2025 10:26 am
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[personal profile] rachelmanija


Katabasis releases at the end of August. I read an advance copy.

I have to conclude that R. F. Kuang's fiction is just not to my taste. This is the first book of hers that I even managed to finish, having previously given up on both Babel (anvillicious, with anvillicious footnotes) and The Poppy War (boring) quite early on. However, a lot of my customers love her books, so I will buy and sell multiple copies of this one.

The structure and concept of Katabasis is quite appealing. Alice Law is at magic college, obsessively determined to succeed. When exploitative working conditions lead to her making a mistake that gorily kills her mentor Professor Grimes, Alice still needs his recommendation... so she goes to Hell to fetch him back! She's followed by another student, Peter, who is a perfect genius who she doesn't realize is in love with her. Their journey through Hell takes up almost all of the book, interspersed by flashbacks to college.

Lots of people will undoubtedly love this book. I found it thuddingly obvious and lacking in charm. The humor was mildly amusing at best. The magic is boring and highly technical. Alice is frustratingly oblivious, self-centered, and monomaniacal - which is clearly a deliberate character choice, but I did not enjoy reading about her. Hell was boring - how do you make Hell boring?!

Spoilery reveal about Peter: Read more... )

The entire book, I felt like I was sitting there twiddling my fingers waiting for Alice to figure out that it's not okay for college to be exploitative and abusive, that it was bad for Professor Grimes to have sexually assaulted her, that Peter loved her, and that success isn't everything. Though at least it didn't have anvillicious footnotes [1] like Babel!

[1] Legally and morally, Professor Grimes sexually assaulted Alice. It is common for survivors of sexual assault to not recognize it as such at the time, especially when the assault involves an abuse of power. [2]

[2] It is an abuse of power for a professor to make any sexual overture to a student, even a seemingly consensual [3] one.

[3] Due to the power differential, no sexual relations between a professor and a student can ever be truly consensual.

I will continue to stock Kuang's books but this is probably the last time I will attempt to actually read one.

I do love the cover.

A Comedy of Errors

Jul. 31st, 2025 01:03 pm
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[personal profile] osprey_archer
I posted a while back that Julius Caesar was “my first and oldest Shakespearian love,” which in one sense in true, but in another sense is tragic A Comedy of Errors erasure.

When I was in junior high, the local university put on a production of A Comedy of Errors, which my mother and I loved so much that we invited my best friend and her mother to see it with us the next weekend. And then (I only learned this recently) apparently my mother snuck out one day and watched it yet another time, while I was at school! You can see why she didn’t inform me of this traitorous plan. Watching A Comedy of Errors without me indeed!

So of course I was delighted when I saw that one of the Indianapolis Shakespeare companies was going to Shakespeare-in-the-park A Comedy of Errors this summer. I retained dim memories of the plot (to be fair, the plot is basically “Two sets of identical twins separated at birth! SHENANIGANS!”) but intense memories of the hilarity, and I am happy to say that Shakespeare in the park delivered.

That formative junior high production was set more or less when and where the play was originally set, and featured actors who genuinely might be mistaken for each other as the twins. The Shakespeare-in-the-park version is set in Daytona Beach in 1984 (but a version of 1984 where you can’t contact the Coast Guard or otherwise use a telephone to try to track down your lost wife and children when you are all tragically separated in a shipwreck), and raised many chuckles by replacing the place names with cities around the Gulf of Mexico: Boca Raton, Cuba, Venice Beach.

(The merchant who is from Syracuse in the original is here from Venice Beach, and in perhaps a nod at The Merchant of Venice, dressed like the Rabbi from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, while everyone else is running around in Hawaiian shirts. Props to the actor for running around in a long coat on a hot humid evening.)

Also, every time they go to “the mart,” they replaced it with “Kmart.” I believe Shakespeare would have approved this pandering to the giggling crowd.

Also, the twins in this production were only vaguely similar, but dressed alike so you could definitely tell who was twin to whom. The Dromios were cross-cast, but the characters were still male, which made for a very funny moment near the beginning of the play right after the Dromios have been “born” (to a character who was pregnant with a beach ball): “male twins,” emphasizes the Merchant of Venice Beach who is narrating this flashback, and at once the Dromios slouch into a masculine posture and one of them grunts, “Whiskey club.”

All in all, just a grand old time, the kind of slapstick hilarity that you can enjoy even as a thirteen-year-old who is a little bit vague about what a lot of this Shakespearian language means.

Also, although I have at this point seen a number of Shakespeares, this was my first Shakespeare in the Park experience. We brought along a picnic and drank three bottles of wine between the four of us and had a wonderful time.

(no subject)

Jul. 31st, 2025 07:52 am
skygiants: Audrey Hepburn peering around a corner disguised in giant sunglasses, from Charade (sneaky like hepburnninja)
[personal profile] skygiants
I really enjoyed Adam Gidwitz's The Inquisitor's Tale a few years back and also I really enjoy espionage, so when [personal profile] osprey_archer alerted us that Adam Gidwitz had written a children's WWII espionage thriller called Max in the House of Spies, I immediately jumped on board for a buddy read, about which here is [personal profile] osprey_archer's post.

I knew from the inside cover that the plot of this book involved German Jewish refugee Max getting shipped off to the UK on the kindertransport and subsequently recruited for espionage, with an invisible dybbuk and an invisible kobold on his shoulder.

I did NOT know that it was also RPF ABOUT EWEN MONTAGU, MR. 'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' HIMSELF?!?!

The fact that the spy foster uncles whom Max meets in England are Ewen and Ivor Montagu, respectively Mr. Operation Mincemeat and The Communist Plot Device In Several Fictional Operation Mincemeat adaptations, altered the experience of the book significantly for me. I don't know that it made it better or worse per se but it immediately became much, much funnier.

To be clear Operation Mincemeat is not referenced at all in the text of the book, although Jean Leslie and Charles Cholmondeley make significant cameos (alas, no Hester Leggett, though we were eagerly awaiting her!). Ewen Montagu was chosen out of the many available interesting historical British intelligence officers this RPF project both because he's Jewish and he had a brother who was both Also an Interesting Guy and Also a Communist Spy. By putting Max between Ewen and Ivor, Gidwitz gets to explore the complex position of Jews in England, point out the moral ambiguities of Britain's role in the war, bring in some alternate political viewpoints, and also discuss the Inevitable Betrayals of Espionage in a way that remains appropriate for a middle grade novel. I think it's a very smart move and I appreciate it. It is just also, again, very very funny. I want the Ewen Montagu scion who wrote the politely scathing review of the Colin Firth film and its unnecessary romance plot to review this one for me please.

Now both [personal profile] osprey_archer and [personal profile] genarti, in reading this book at the same time I did, thought perhaps it was a bit implausible that British Intelligence would recruit a thirteen-year-old for active service duty. I did not have the same stumbling block. I have read Le Carre! And so has Adam Giswitz, because he talks about it at the end of the book. If you put yourself in Le Carre mindset, as indeed this book is very determined to be in the middle-grade version of the Le Carre mindset, it is only a small hop, skip and a jump to 'let's recruit a thirteen-year-old.' ("But," [personal profile] osprey_archer pointed out, "it's RPF and Ewen Montagu told us about everything he did and so we know he didn't recruit a thirteen-year-old." Small details.)

However, the thing that did throw me is the fact that the dybbuk and the kobold mostly seem to exist in this book to point out how absurd it is that British intelligence is attempting to recruit a thirteen-year-old. They Statler and Waldorf angrily around on Max's soldiers going 'this is ABSURD. why are they letting you do this! you are going to DIE!' I think it must be an intentional irony that the supernatural creatures are there as the voice of the reader/voice of reason, but I'm not sure it's an irony that ... works ...... I mean they're quite funny but if we are expected to believe these critters have been around since the dawn of time they surely have seen worse things in their thousands of years than a thirteen-year-old going to war.

Okay, aside from that, one other thing did throw me, which is the several times I had to stare at the page and hiss 'EXCUSE ME! THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT!'

With those two caveats I did have a great time, and I was both annoyed and excited to find out at the end of this book that it's part one of a duology and I have a whole second Max Espionage Adventure to experience.

(no subject)

Jul. 30th, 2025 11:50 am
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[personal profile] rachelmanija
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 121


Which of these books that I've recently read would you most like me to review?

View Answers

Red Rising, by Pierce Brown. SF dystopia much beloved by many dudes.
18 (14.9%)

The Daughter's War & Blacktongue Thief, by Christopher Buehlman. Dark fantasy featuring WAR CORVIDS.
34 (28.1%)

The Bog Wife, by Kay Chronister. Very hard to categorize novel about a family whose oldest son can call a wife from the bog. Maybe.
32 (26.4%)

Katabasis, by R. F. Kuang. A descent into Hell by a pair of magic students.
49 (40.5%)

The Bewitching, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Three timelines, all involving witches.
21 (17.4%)

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Exactly what it sounds like.
37 (30.6%)

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle. It's so much harder to write reviews of books I love.
36 (29.8%)

Troubled Waters, by Sharon Shinn. Small-scale fantasy with really original magic system; loved this.
56 (46.3%)

Hominids, by Robert Sawyer. Alternate world where Neanderthals reign meets ours.
30 (24.8%)

Under One Banner, by Graydon Saunders. Yes I will get to this, but it'll be a re-read in chunks.
13 (10.7%)

A round-up of multiple books (not the ones in this poll) with just a couple sentences each
22 (18.2%)



Have you read any of these? What did you think?

The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio

Jul. 30th, 2025 11:25 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


This book has a hilarious premise: a single woman's attic suddenly starts producing husbands! A husband comes down from the attic of Lauren's London flat, and she's instantly in an alternate reality in which she married that guy. The decor of her flat shifts, sometimes her own body or job shifts depending on whether she now works out regularly or some such, and sometimes there's wider ripple effects. Lauren is always aware of the changes, but no one else is. If the husband goes back into the attic, he vanishes and a new husband comes down.

I adore this premise, and the book absolutely commits to it. It is 100% about husbands coming down from the attic. Unfortunately, I didn't really like the way it explored the premise. It's largely a metaphor for dating in a time when you can swipe on an internet profile and instantly get rid of a possible match, so Lauren cycles through hundreds of husbands, often rejecting them at a glance, and we only ever get to know a very small number of them. Of the ones we do get to know, they're mostly fairly one-note - handsome and nice and American, handsome and nice but chews with his mouth open, handsome and nice but boring, or mean and hard to get rid of. The falling Ken dolls cover is apt in more ways than one. Lauren is also pretty one-note - shallow and frantic.

I also had an issue with the pacing. There's so much repetition of the same actions. A husband comes down, Lauren examines her text messages and photos for evidence of their history together, Lauren calls her friends to see what they know about him. A husband comes down, Lauren takes one look at him and sends him back. Some of this is funny but it gets old. The book felt at least 50 pages longer than it needed to be.

I would have liked the book a lot more if there had been way fewer husbands, and more time spent with each one. I never really got a sense of what Lauren wanted in a man, apart from some surface-level characteristics, or what she wanted in life. Her lives were also generally not that different, which didn't help.

There was one part that I really liked and was actually surprising.

Read more... )

Rec by Naomi Kritzer, who liked it more than I did. But thanks for the rec! It was an interesting read, and not one I'd have found by myself.

My absolute favorite alternate lives story remains the novella And Then There were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker, available free online at that link.
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[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is an unsubtly sweet book, an homage to Puerto Rico and its people and also a lovely depiction of being a second-culture kid. Nico is a budding filmmaker, desperate to win the approval of the most famous Puerto Rican in the world, filmmaker and musical writer Juan Miguel Baranda. (I said "unsubtly," didn't I?) He's spending a glorious summer with his abuela and his two primos, looking forward to lazy days at abuela's house, glorious snacks, and beach time.

But the three cousins have far more adventure than they bargained for when they encounter a chupacabra--and the rest of the legends of Puerto Rico are not far behind. Nico and his family have to figure out what the mysterious creatures and sublime beings are trying to tell them, before the island they love faces devastation again--this time possibly for good.

Sometimes Nico's angst about his movie career and his parents' relationship slows the pace of this middle grade fantasy, but cousins Nessi and Kira are always there to pick up the pace--and Pineiro succeeds in what Nico hopes to do, painting a portrait of the island he loves so that the rest of the world can see what he loves about it.

When listicles go wrong

Jul. 30th, 2025 08:53 am
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[personal profile] mrissa
 New story out today! Things I Miss About Civilization appears in Nature Futures. Just a scientist, a slightly broken spaceship, and the great expanse between galaxies....

Wednesday Reading Meme

Jul. 30th, 2025 08:17 am
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[personal profile] osprey_archer
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Another Newbery! Lois Lenski’s Phebe Fairchild Her Book, which is set in Connecticut in the 1830s and features Phebe Fairchild, sent from the port of New Haven to stay with her Puritan farming cousins upstate, where she has to hide her Mother Goose because the Puritan farming cousins do not approve of silly rhymes. Phebe learns some farming skills, the Puritan cousins learn to unbend a bit, and a good time was had by all.

I’ve vaguely meant to read Liz Kessler’s The Tail of Emily Windsnap for years, and then [personal profile] troisoiseaux posted about it, and then [personal profile] asakiyume decided to read it (and later posted about it too), so obviously its time had come.

Unfortunately, I think I just waited way too long on this book. I might have liked it better if I had read it back in 2003, when I was still reasonably young and impressionable, although I might equally have been even more annoyed by the fact that mermaid society is not a thoroughly worldbuilt society in its own right, but merely an underwater reflection of the land world. The court stenographer may be writing her report in squid ink, and the presiding judge may be the King of the Mermaids himself, but otherwise the court functions exactly like a law court on a TV show.

What I’m Reading Now

Nearing the end of Lord Peter. Read the MOST HORRIFYING story this week, in which spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

Two Newbery books left to go! The project is almost complete, a mere seven years after it began!

We saw the huskies yesterday!

Aug. 1st, 2025 09:24 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Moonpie started to get super hyped up, as usual, and so did they, so I picked her up... and ended up with two huskies eagerly jumping up on me to say hi to their best chihuahua friend!

Well, at least my feet were firmly planted. Before we saw the huskies, on our earlier walk, we bumped into a friendly yorkie (?) - no collar, no people. But well-fed and groomed, this isn't another Finn. He eventually disappeared under a fence, but I've been asking everybody I saw if they know whose dog he is exactly, because I was that worried. Was he outside alone in the heat? That's no good.

Anyway, I asked the guy with the huskies, and he had no idea, but he told me something else - the day before, he thinks he saw a fox! I'm not sure he wasn't just mistaken, but if he isn't - wow! I know we have bunnies on the South Shore, and coyotes in the Bronx, and whatever the city says we definitely have a full time population of deer mid-Island, so maybe a fox isn't so strange.

***********


Read more... )
sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
[personal profile] sovay
We never heard back about the broken central air which I had to repair myself, but apparently the time could be found to send contractors to scythe down almost every green thing on the property. There was a mulberry tree in the back yard which I had been enjoying as it fruited. Now it's a naked raw stump in a buzz-cut of brown stubble. A rose-tree in our driveway had been nodding its green shade against my office window and reaching its leaves up to the casement in the bathroom and it's gone, too. Nothing is left in the back except the lilac which looks crisped and desolate and some thin ornamental with the yew trees in the front. We weren't warned. The house doesn't look landscaped, it looks slaughtered. I had seen squirrels and birds in the mulberry. I had just taken some pictures of our wild yard and [personal profile] spatch had taken some pictures of me in it. The black swallow-wort they could uproot any time, but I had been photographing that rose for almost three years now, growing like a metaphor from the cracks in the concrete gutter.

Book Review: Enchanted Cornwall

Jul. 29th, 2025 08:20 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
Daphne du Maurier’s Enchanted Cornwall: Her Pictorial Memoir is a little bit a memoir about du Maurier’s life, but mostly about her lifelong love affair with Cornwall and the many books that she set there. The book was published near the end of her life (perhaps posthumously?) and is thus padded out with long excerpts from those books, most of which I skipped because either (a) I had read the book and therefore didn’t need to reread the excerpt, or (b) I hadn’t read the book and didn’t want to be spoiled, but nonetheless a good read because it’s full of interesting tidbits. For instance:

J. M. Barrie was du Maurier’s uncle and her older sister Alice played Wendy in one production of Peter Pan.

(There are some other connections that I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it certainly confirmed my feeling that the entirety of the early 20th century British art world - art encompassing theater, painting, writing, etc - was in fact one extended social network where everyone knew everyone and half of them were related by marriage.)

During the filming of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock referred to the (nameless) main character as Daphne de Winter, an identification which du Maurier cheerfully accepts.

Although the grounds of Manderley were based on the grounds of du Maurier’s beloved Menabilly, the house itself was based on a different country house, Milton.

Although du Maurier recounts her courtship with her husband (which seems to have loosely inspired Frenchman’s Creek), the real love story of this book is with Menabilly. Du Maurier devotes an entire chapter to wooing and winning the house. The distant glimpses from sea and land. The first visit, cut short when an early darkness descends while du Maurier and her sister approach the house on the winding forested front drive. The second visit, when du Maurier rose before dawn to approach by the sea. Repeated visits to explore the grounds, culminating at last in a visit where du Maurier found a window open, and climbed in to explore the crumbling abandoned house…

All this culminated in du Maurier securing the house for a twenty-five year rental, begun during World War II. Everyone told her that she’d never be able to repair the roof, get electricity installed, or otherwise render the place habitable, and she proved all of them wrong.

Du Maurier considered Frenchman’s Creek her only really romantic book. So if you’ve ever read her other books and wondered “Am I supposed to consider this horror show of a couple romantic?”, the answer is apparently no!

saving to the murmuration

Jul. 28th, 2025 07:56 pm
asakiyume: (bluebird)
[personal profile] asakiyume
"Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird," read the beginning of a Bluesky post that linked to a 30-minute Youtube video about birdsong and starlings' capacity for mimicry. A guy drew a picture of a bird in a spectral synthesizer, which then will produce the sounds that the lines indicate.** The guy played those sounds for a starling, and lo and behold, the bird copied it--such that when you look at the spectrogram, you see a picture of a bird that's very close to the picture the guy had drawn.

So it's in that sense that the guy saved an image to a starling.

I'm charmed that this involves translation from a visual medium to a sound medium. "We can save your picture, but only if you sing it." --This concept of translation is familiar to us, of course. Data that's stored digitally is translated into zeros and ones, then translated back into something we can understand--words, images, sounds, formulae.

... If we were going to use starlings to save our data, we'd have to beg not individual starlings but whole murmurations.

Imagine if you had to sing or say all your data to save it. Imagine going out and standing on a hill and taking a deep breath and just singing out, hoping that the murmuration would deign to listen and retain what you were singing. It would be like an incantation or an invocation or a prayer.



**A spectrograph of a bird's call looks like, for example, this:

(Song sparrow spectrograph from this web page)


So the guy drew the bird below and then played the sounds that this set of lines makes...

white line drawing of a bird on a blue background

And the starling sang back this:

pink-purple bird on an a black background

(Images are screenshots from the Youtube video.)
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
I sent this post in memoriam Tom Lehrer to [personal profile] selkie, after which it hit me that the funniest part about Lehrer working for a born-secret agency was that he said as much in public. It's in the Revisited introduction to "The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be" (1960): "Now if I may indulge in a bit of personal history, a few years ago I worked for a while at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. I had a job there as a spy. No . . . I guess you know that the staff out there at that time was composed almost exclusively of spies . . . of one persuasion or another . . ." It's a hit with the audience, who did not have a chance of knowing for another thirty-odd years that he meant it. What Lehrer actually did for the NSA still appears unconfirmed, but writing in the second edition of Quantum Profiles (1991/2020) his one-time fellow Harvardian Jeremy Bernstein guessed—the classical combination of mathematical skill and being an absolute weirdo—"probably codebreaking." I'd never thought about it and I'd believe it. That line run on the audience in MIT's Kresge Auditorium in 1959 is a cryptographer's joke: it works in its own right, but to get it properly requires a key. Jesus, can you imagine him and Leo Marks in a room together? It would have been an arms race which of them could be self-deprecatingly funnier without giving a thing they didn't want to away.

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