sophia_sol | Entries tagged with pub date: 2023

You may or may not remember the news story of the birder in central park who was confronted by a white woman and threatened with police because he was black, in May 2020. This book is that black birder's memoir.

Overall, a good book, and one I'm glad I read. Christian Cooper is much more than "just" a black man and a birder. He's gay, he's a nerd, he's an activist, he's pagan, he loves travelling, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things are a part of his life and shape who he is and how he reacted in that viral moment.

I really appreciated how he put that central park story near the end of the narrative, contextualising it in the rest of his life -- and then following it with a story about a similar confrontation in the same place just one year later contextualizes it even further. And also, that's not the end of his story. And I love how it ends! Tn the delight of always being able to see something new and learn something more about birds, no matter how long you've been a birder, and always being ready to throw yourself into the moment for it!

I do think the momentum in the book dragged a bit in the middle, plus I found it awkward how he made multiple references earlier in the book to the central park incident that made him famous; it makes the book feel too much of-the-moment, when a lot of what he's saying in this book is that that moment wasn't actually a bizarre outlier in his life as a whole.

But Cooper has led an interesting life, and I enjoyed hearing about it, and learnint about his time working for Marvel comics especially. He was part of the team working on Alpha Flight when the superhero Northstar came out as gay!

I listened to to this book as an audiobook, and Cooper narrates it himself. I like how his enthusiasm comes through in his reading, though whenever he tries put on a voice when doing dialogue for other people, it often comes out sounding loudly exasperated when he's aiming for high energy or high emotion, which is irritating.

One fun thing that the audiobook format allows is that at the beginning of each section of the book, there's an audio clip of birdsong, for a bird species that will be featured in that section of text! I really enjoyed trying to ID the bird from the song and then listening for when it would come up in one of his stories.

Overall, though it's not a perfect book, I am glad I read it and I think it's worth reading.

A nonfiction book I listened to as an audiobook. I went into it with the understanding that it's a memoir about a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and on the perspective that spending SO many hours around the same pieces of art over years gave him. And it is that!

But it's also about more than that: what kinds of things led him to become a museum security guard, and about what the job of museum security job entails, and about people-watching and people-interacting. And, over all, about the huge impact of grief on a person's life. The author's brother died as a young adult, and it was in the aftermath of that loss that he decided he needed a job with less pressure than the kind of promising office job he'd had, one that would allow him time to process.

It's a beautiful book, thoughtful and meaningful and interesting. His reflections on art really are good! As is everything else! I loved it.

Edit: but also

pauraque has a really good point about the unexamined privilege in the pov the author is coming from in their review

I decided to read Dungeon Meshi because I kept seeing people on tumblr posting about the new anime adaptation, and it looked fun and cute. And although I don't watch much tv, there was an entire manga I could read instead! So I did.

The basic premise: in a world where adventuring parties going on dungeon crawls is a thing that happens, one guy has a dream: to be able to cook and eat all the different kinds of monsters in the dungeon, to be able to find out how they taste!

And because his party needs to be able to head deep into the dungeon to rescue a party member who was left behind, and they don't have the funds or the time to collect supplies, all of a sudden they have REASON to need to eat monsters. They're going to forage and hunt for all their meals as they make their way down.

So using that as the basis, the manga goes on to explore the worldbuilding, the interrelationships of the characters in the party, everyone's backstories and reasons for being there, a developing plot, and of course, the ingredients and nutritional composition and flavour of every meal they eat.

I absolutely adored every bit of this!!! The main characters are all a delight, and it's the kind of story where the author sees and shows you the inherent personness of all characters, including antagonists. And the world created to make sense of the dungeon's existence is fascinating, as are all the ways the ecosystems within the dungeon are expanded upon to make sense of the creatures living within it.

And it's a story that knows what its themes are, too, and is able to tie them all together in extremely satisfying ways in the climax of the narrative!

I had this moment leading up towards the ending where I was like:

cut for thematic spoilers I guess

ohhhh it's about....everyone being part of a balanced ecosystem of life and death where everything sustains everything else! the various human species included! and I was filled through my very soul with this feeling of connectedness myself.

Anyway it was amazing and I had a lot of feels.

And as well as enjoying all of that, I also just really loved our main characters! We start out seeing them all fairly shallowly but over the course of the story as more aspects of them are revealed they're all just.....I love every one of them.

I did struggle with a few aspects of the manga, but none of it significantly affected my ability to enjoy the read:

1. It kept adding more and more characters, and I got rather lost occasionally trying to keep track of them all. But ultimately it's not vital to remember every tertiary character to get a good read out of this, so it's not as bad as it could be.

2. In the mid to later parts, it became a lot more plot focused and actiony than I'd really been expecting, in a way that made it harder for me to follow, since fight scenes in sequential art are challenging for me. And occasionally it drew back more than I wanted from its focus on food. But it refocused eventually!

3. It turned out to be pro monarchy in the end, which isn't my fave, but it's not like a major theme of the manga or anything so I could overlook it.

4. I kept expecting it to have at least a little bit of textual queerness, and there wasn't any as far as I could see! Even various background relationships or depictions of people's attraction was m/f. But uh. Falin/Marcille, anyone? There are some powerful vibes there. (I'll also accept Laios/Kabru)

In conclusion, I highly recommend it, and if you want to read it, you can read the whole thing online for free in English translation here: https://dungeonmeshi.com/manga/dungeon-meshi-chapter-1/

Whoops I wrote this review ages ago and forgot to post it! Here you go.

Sohla is a chef and I've loved following her youtube career on various channels for the last few years -- she has such presence, vibrancy, obvious skill and passion. She seems to enjoy deliberately giving herself higher bars to reach, greater challenges to figure out how to work through, and it's such fun to watch.

And this recipe book has a neat premise -- it's not just a collection of recipes, but is designed to lead you through developing various skills in the kitchen as you work your way through the book. I enjoy that this means the recipes are organised by technique instead of by what stage of the meal it's to be eaten at; a different way of organizing a cookbook than the standard, but I think it makes just as much sense this way!

Unfortunately a lot of the recipes turned out to be ones I have no interest in, whether featuring ingredients I don't enjoy eating, or ingredients I'm not willing to pay for, or having processes that require owning a stand mixer. As a result I can't go through the book as she intended. So I ended up just skimming through it and then putting it aside, though I did save a few recipes to try later.

I think that if you're a person with more interest than me in seafood and/or dairy, this could be a really good book for you! And from what I see I think it does a very good job of teaching various skills. But as it is, for me, I'll go back to just watching Sohla on youtube.

Another historical romance novel by Courtney Milan, an author who's one of the few on my will-always-read list. And as usual I loved it! This is the second in her Wedgeford series, set in a village in England with a high percentage of Chinese residents in the 19th century.

Naomi is a young woman who grew up in Wedgeford her whole life, and feels stifled and small but is determined to find ways to do the things she wants to do. Kai is the son of a habitual con man who had tricked Wedgeford's residents out of much of their money when Kai was a young child before disappearing, and now Kai is returning with his own agenda. Because of reasons, they pretend to be engaged to each other!

I loved both main characters so much, and their relationship with each other and with the other people in their lives. Both of them are deeply affected by being raised by the parents they had, and the environments they grew up in, but in very different ways from each other, and both have to learn how to how to update their perspectives on some aspects of it. And there are also many other people who have been important to them in various ways, whether they've been able to see it or not!

I also loved how much passion they both had for the things they do in their lives. I think this is one of the things I love about Milan's romances -- how much and how deeply her characters always care about the things that are of importance to them. they have passions and obsessions that they throw themselves wholeheartedly into. For Naomi it's taking an ambulance course (a multi-day first aid course, to learn how to deal with medical emergencies before the professionals are able to get there), and for Kai it's pottery.

I wanted more about the ambulance class than the book actually ended up giving me, which was disappointing, but I remember seeing Milan write somewhere online about how much of what would have been taught in a class like that in that era was bunk or an outright dangerous bad idea, so she didn't want to focus on that. Which is suuuuper fair!

But we get to hear lots of Kai's opinions about pottery and I loved every bit of it. You cannot get this guy to shut up about his pottery opinions once he gets going and he feels so strongly about it and it's GREAT. In the author's note Milan talks about how she ended up learning how to do pottery herself in the process of researching this book and you can tell how much Milan knows about the kinds of opinions a really good potter might have, including some more idiosyncratic ones. I'm endlessly charmed by it all.

But also it's a book about learning what it is to be seen by someone who sees you as who you truly are, and loved for it, and learning how to trust, both trusting others and trusting yourself, and that's beautiful too.

cut for some spoilers

Like the first Wedgeford book, this is another one that doesn't have the traditional romance novel beat of the climax where everything seems to be falling apart and the romantic leads break up or are separated or mistrust each other or accuse each other of something, and again you can see how the book COULD have gone that route and deliberately was written not to, and I like it so much. It's so much less stressful a read! There are still tough things they have to deal with in their relationship before getting to the happy ending, but it never feels manufactured, or like there's an idiot ball being passed around to make the plot work.

I do feel like the conclusion of the book was a bit rushed in the pacing which made it feel anticlimactic instead of satisfying. Always frustrating in a book that I otherwise love! But overall it was still a great read, which involved multiple squeaks of delight as I made my way through it.

Also I want to note that there's secondary character ace rep in this book which is very good :)

Note: I received a free ARC ebook in exchange for an honest review.

Any book by Ursula Vernon (the author behind the Kingfisher penname) will have certain features, and those inherent features are ones that keep me coming back book after book to everything she writes. I love how she does worldbuilding, and I love her practical get-things-done heroines, and I love how everything's always grounded in the odd specific annoyances of what it would actually be like to be in the fantastical circumstances she writes about. And she does SUCH good road trips! So many opportunities to run into fun NPCs and cool regional worldbuilding!

I'm not quite the right audience for her paladin romances, unfortunately -- I think because I just get too irritated by the depth and breadth of their ability to feel guilty about absolutely everything. But I keep reading them because I'm having fun with everything else anyway, and because the wider arc of the business with the dead god fascinates me, and we get a bit more about it every book!

This book, though, feels to me a little less successful than the previous paladin romances in the series. It feels a bit too much to me like several different books squished into one, I think, instead of like multiple strands of the same book, and I just don't love all of those books.

click here for spoilery thoughts

There's the one where Marguerite is trying to get herself free of the Red Sail by finding the missing artificer and leaking the plans for the salt-making mechanism and thereby destabilizing the economy of the whole region, and there's the one with the Dreaming God's paladins and the Saint of Steel's soul-scarred ex-paladins dealing with the demon who wants to be a god, and there's the one about the romance between Marguerite and Shane.

The first one is a perfectly good spy plot, not really my go-to genre of book but fun enough, and I do enjoy the temple of the white rat being willing to meddle in these things.

The second one is FASCINATING to me and I want to think about the implications forever and I want more details!!!

The third one is....yet another guilt-ridden paladin romance.........also featuring a spy who doesn't trust anyone but just KNOWS in her HEART that she can trust HIM and he's the exception to everything about how she's conducted her life. It's just really really not my kind of romance story. Also both of them are extremely allosexual and are continually having their higher brain functions disabled by how attractive the other person is and it just seems comically over-the-top to me, an ace person who Doesn't Get It. (okay I AM charmed by the type of kinky not-quite-bondage that Shane turns out to be really into when Marguerite is like, ok I gotta find SOME way of achieving good sex with this guy who can't get out of his own head about anything.)

I'm sure the romance part of the book is good for some people! but that's um. not what I read Kingfisher romances for, surprise surprise.

So let's go back to the demon who wants to be a god, shall we? I was FASCINATED by Wisdom and by what demons are. And by the implications of what a god is, too, tbh.

Wisdom seems to genuinely care about its followers to some degree, has figured out how to live as a part of the world, has thoughts and feelings and motivations and relationships and goals. It's definitely been doing some worrying stuff, but is it any more evil than a really powerful human can be? What ARE demons, and what makes them appreciably different from gods, in the end, in this world? They clearly CAN have comparable types of bonds with humans if they so choose, and some gods are definitely terrible if I'm remembering stuff from previous books, so why couldn't demons have the possibility of being basically okay.

And what is Hell? It's the place where demons are from, and it's the place where paladins can bind a demon to never be able to leave (if they're powerful enough to manage the binding), and from what little we hear from Wisdom about it, it seems like an undesirable place to be. Wouldn't most folks kind of suck in some respect if their entire prior existence was in a place like Hell?

I really hope this series is going in a direction of non-evil demons tbh! maybe even....some of the major gods today having previously been demons? Maybe the saint of steel was a demon and someone murdered him because of that!

anyway my increasing pro let-demons-be-people agenda means I feel weird at the end of this book about Shane taking up with the Dreaming God in the end, the god who is well known to be virulently anti-demon. Is this god unambiguously a good guy and nothing else?

I'll be very curious to see where this whole plot continues!

I started my reread of Heaven Official's Blessing in September and have been working my way steadily through it ever since. This time I posted my as-it-happened thoughts to mastodon as I went, because there's just SO much book in this book that there's no way I'd remember everything by the end! So now I'm copying all those thoughts over to here for posterity. Warning, this is like 22,000 words of thoughts. But this book is so GOOD it's worth every one of those words and so many more besides! I could talk about this book forever it feels like.

Anyway. On with the liveblog! (originally posted to: https://federatedfandom.net/@soph_sol/tagged/tgcfthoughts)

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THE END.

A short novella attempting to tread the line between mythic storytelling and a closer more personal story, and in my opinion not quite getting the balance right.

The mythic elements felt good, well constructed and each part of the story following naturally from what had come before it to tell the kind of story that myths are made to tell. It had the logic of stories that come from the folk tradition. But it also tried to include more psychological reality for its characters than really felt like it fit the myth logic, and it left me feeling like I never quite got to know any of the major characters as people and yet they didn't embody a Type the way characters in folk traditions often do either.

Also there are a number of extended, violent fight sequences. And yes I'm not the right audience for such things, I'm usually just not that interested, but I also felt like those diluted the focus on the Story and the Themes, like, yes the results of the fights are important to those things but we don't need a blow-by-blow to get what's needed out of those. it felt to me more like those were included because the author enjoys fight scenes tbh.

Idk. Overall there's a lot about it that's very promising, in an early book by a new author, and the story it's telling will I think be sticking with me for a while, but ultimately the way the book's put together just doesn't quite work for me

This is the latest T Kingfisher dark fairy tale retelling, and like, if you've read these by her before then you know the kind of thing you're getting into. And I have, and I do, and as always I am here for it.

I don't have a great deal to say about this one, but in this particular case the T Kingfisher trademarked "practical heroine who does the hard thing that needs to be done" is also a bit of a wet blanket. I love her.

Also,

click here for some spoilers

I love that in the end Toadling doesn't actually have to decide between exploring her connection with Halim and returning to the love and acceptance of her greenteeth monster family, because she's going to outlive him by centuries, so she can go hang out with him while he's alive and then go home again after.

Damn, another real banger from Aster Glenn Gray! She's just so good at historically-grounded character-rich retellings of stories from the folk tradition.

The Sleeping Soldier is an m/m Sleeping Beauty retelling. Russell, a Union soldier from the US civil war, falls asleep for a hundred years and wakes up in the 1960's to a different world. Caleb is a college student who meets the newly-woken Russell and takes it upon himself to be Russell's guide to the world he's ended up in.

I love how real the social mores of both the 1860's and the 1960's are in the narrative of this novel - both are clearly realized, and different from each other and from today. What does same-sex friendship look like? what does dating look like? what does it mean to have sex with someone else, what does it mean to have sex with a friend, what does it mean to be gay?

In sum - what are the expected patterns of the shapes of different kinds of relationships, and how do these assumptions work when you're from two different cultures separated by the gulf of a hundred years?

And god, the way it kept coming up over and over all the different ways in which it was no longer acceptable for men to express affection and closeness to one another, physical or emotional, platonic or otherwise! PAINFUL, and so true, and something that hasn't actually changed from the 1960's to today. The days of romantic friendship are gone.

Russell gives it his all to throw himself into finding ways to be happy and comfortable and to fit in in this new life of his, and Caleb is so, so earnest and caring and brave and scared. It's scary to be gay in the 1960's! It can literally mean your death!

I really appreciated that although the main focus was on the Russell/Caleb relationship, and the various other communities and relationships they're a part of and which are meaningful to them as well, we also got to see a bit about romantic friendship between girls in the past as well, via Caleb's historical research project. And I loved how much he loved the girls in the letters he was studying!

I also appreciated that it came up more than once what a stark difference there was in songbird populations between 1865 and 1965, because yeah, the enormous decline would be noticeable.

Anyway the book was amazing and I nearly cried at the end and I definitely stayed up way too late last night reading it but regret nothing.

When I watched The Untamed (hereafter CQL) in 2021, my immediate thought upon finishing was that I HAD to read the book (hereafter MDZS) that it was based on. Now, more than two years later, I have finally done that.

And it's so good you guys!

And also, really very different from CQL.

I knew that already, because on top of the way that inevitably at least some things get changed in any adaptation process, I understand that the complex system of chinese censorship has standards for a wide variety of different things not being allowed to be shown on tv. And several of those things are integral to the version of the story in MDZS.

Being now familiar with the versions of the story told in both tv and book, I think the difference that's the biggest is the moral universe being presented by the themes of each story. CQL is the story of a person who always tries his best to do what's right, and is treated poorly by society because of it, but eventually is able to triumph. MDZS is the story of a person who makes some huge mistakes and then has to (gets to?) learn how to live with them.

Both are wonderful stories worth telling! And they have a lot in common. But they are not, in the end, the same story. Going forward I will definitely be paying more attention to which version is being tagged as the fandom when I open fic!

I do feel like I'm not quite up to writing a coherent review of the book right now though. I read the first two-thirds or so back in April, and then accidentally took a multi-month break from reading it, and then read through the remainder over the course of the last few weeks. So the beginning portions of the book are fuzzy in my head and easy to confuse with everything else I have read about CQL/MDZS and the fanfic of both, and it's hard to hold the shape of the entire narrative in my head.

But I do have a few more notes! Most of which are varyingly spoilery for either or both of CQL & MDZS

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idk I feel like I'm spending most of this review talking about MDZS only as relates to CQL which feels a bit unfair to MDZS as the originator, like I'm not respecting it as its own thing! But it's hard for me to talk about it in any other way after having spent the last two years so much in the fandom. If I'd come to MDZS before I ever knew anything about CQL this would be reading very differently!

At some point I do want to do a closer reading of MDZS to appreciate it better for what it specifically is doing, like the way I'm currently doing a TGCF close read on mastodon. There's so much fruitful stuff to pay attention to in any work by MXTX.

Anyway please rec me fic that is particularly good at being based in MDZS canon! I want to spend more time exploring it!

I mad the fatal mistake of not writing down my initial impressions immediately upon finishing the book, so this review must rely on my inconsistent memory. Can I remember the things that struck me that are worth talking about?! Tune in to the rest of this post to find out.

To Shape a Dragon's Breath is a wonderful alternate-earth historical fantasy novel, with a main character from a culture based on post-colonial Indigenous people in North America. In this context of trying to maintain their way of life despite the devastations of disease and colonial rule, Anequs is a teen who finds a dragon egg and bonds with the new-hatched dragon. By the rules of the colonial government, all dragoneers must attend an academy to learn how to safely control their dragon's powers, so Anequs must leave her home and immerse herself in a culture and a schooling system that were not designed for her.

The author does a wonderful job of showing the many different ways indigenous people respond to the impossible situation they're put in, post-colonization, with no good answers; and the many different big and small manifestations of racism that they face, by people both well-meaning and malicious. Anequs finds both friends and allies, but even within these people she is often having to deal with their own internalized racism.

And I loved the worldbuilding! Although different language and symbols are used, because latin is not the language of science and education in this world, it is clear that the power of a dragon's breath is to break down anything into its constituent elements and rebuild them according to the direction of their person or people. So Anequs in learning vitskraft is basically learning chemistry, and the symbology that can be used to safely direct the power of a dragon's breath to create only the things you want.

And it's fun, too, to see a version of the world where a viking style culture is the one that is dominant in the colonial era instead of british culture, and the ways in which it does and doesn't change things.

(I do think that if one were to carefully draw out all cultural ramifications there would be even more differences between that world and our own history -- eg the clothing would NOT be our world's 19th century western fashion! -- but I do understand that that might be too big a project to undertake, to make every single thing make sense within the internal logic while still making it recognizably 19th century to the reader.)

Anyway I found it a thoroughly enjoyable book with a satisfying ending, but also it's clear from the book that there's more coming in the series and I only wish I could read the rest IMMEDIATELY. But that is not how linear time and recently-published books work!

A future sci-fi story about what it means to have grown up in a radical militaristic doomsday cult in space - it does an amazing job of writing something incredibly readable from the pov of a horrible person. Kyr was raised to believe in the cult's values wholeheartedly so she is awful but she cares so MUCH about the things she believes in, and is so sure she's doing the right things, that the reader is drawn in anyway.

( cut for spoilers because there's a lot to talk about that's spoilers! )

This is the first time in my life that I have gotten to hold in my hands a real actual published book written by a friend of mine, and let me tell you, it is a GREAT experience and also this book lived up to absolutely everything I hoped for from it. Five stars, would collapse into a puddle of emotions again. And I say this without bias! I would have loved this book even if I didn't know Becca!

So The Iron Children is a scifi novella about cyborgs warriors and a robot nun and one squishy human traversing a treacherous landscape together in the midst of war, and also is about questions of identity and religious ethics and duty and kindness and freedom. I loved EVERYTHING about this, I adored all the characters, I loved the worldbuilding, I loved its careful pacing and the way it built on its ideas, I loved that it managed to pack so much into such a short book without ever feeling like it was overcrowded.

The book is told through three different POVs: the squishy human, Asher, who's a young nun-in-training getting thrown in over her head; Barghest, the leader of the cyborg warriors, whose dedication to duty is above and beyond the call of duty; and a character whose identity is a mystery until partway into the book but is definitely one of the other cyborg warriors. The first two characters get their POV sections in third person, but the mystery character's sections are in first person.

I have gone on record in the past as stating that I find it irritating when there's multiple povs and some of them are, for no reason, in a different person than the others.

BUT the key here is that there IS a reason in The Iron Children, and when there's a reason it works! It's got a destabilizing effect, to have one of the three in a different person than the other two; it shows that character as other, as separate. It works thematically! (Okay and incidentally it lets the name be hidden to allow a reveal later on as to which character this one is, which is convenient!)

And now let me go into the realm of spoilers because I have to to talk about everything else I love.

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ANYWAY read this book!!!

It occurs to me, a couple days after I finished reading Sam Starbuck's fourth romance novel, that even though I read these novels on AO3, they should still count as books I read! He's publishing them all and everything!

So I have retroactively added three books to my count for last year (Fete for a King, Infinite Jes, and The Lady and the Tiger) and now I guess I'm writing a review for all four at once.

I've been following Starbuck's fanfic for years, under the name

copperbadge, but last year he started on an original series of linked romance novels set in a tiny fictional European country, along the traditional Ruritanian lines, and I was like, sure, why not. The books feature plenty of queer characters (and only one of the four is about an m/f couple), a country where kingship is an elected position, and lots of feel-good content. Also two of the four have neurodivergent protagonists.

Of the four books, I liked Fete for a King (about a young king and a loud American chef) and The Twelve Points of Caleb Canto (about two Eurovision contestants) the best; the two middle ones (king emeritus and podcaster; two nobles doing politics) didn't land as well for me for a variety of reasons.

Overall the writing style in this series trends strongly in the direction of quippy dialogue for everyone, resulting in me feeling that there's very little sense of there being individual voices for the various characters. I also find constant quips to get kind of exhausting to read after a while, personally.

I also don't love that the focus is on a royal family. Yes, this is not a hereditary monarchy, and yes, the family is very open and welcoming to providing support to whoever appears in their ambit, but....idk. I think this may be one of those things where shining a light on the fact that the book knows hereditary country-leadership is bad means that I'm just more primed to notice ways in which the solution to the problem is imperfect.

The books are very readable, good-hearted, fun, and happy-ending-guaranteed. But I'm not sure I'm going to keep reading them.