most people probably don't need to hear that naomi novik's temeraire series, an alternate history in which the napoleonic wars are fought with dragons, features Dragon Tribulations, but i was not ready for it and had to fawn over the cats in the wee hours this morning to self-soothe. if the rest of the books are anywhere near as entertaining as the first i will be well pleased; if they are not i will rewarch master and commander and imagine russell crowe as a dragon and be well pleased.
in contemporary fantasy, i'm about to start the follow-up to cadwell turnbull's magnificent no gods, no monsters, and i genuinely can't remember if i've posted about it before; a hazard of writing this stuff out when i'm still more than half-asleep on the train, but one does what one can with what one has. he explores identity, othering, allyship, and intersectionality by working through the idea that "monsters" (anyone who uses magic, from seers and witches to shapeshifters) have always lived among nonmagical humans, various secret societies have tried to protext/exploit/exterminate them, and now everyone knows about them—sort of, as their revelation is suppressed and lots of people don't want to wrap their heads around what it would mean if, say, the cops gunned down a werewolf. several of the principal characters work together at a cooperative bookstore; the title's a riff on "no gods, no monsters," the old anarchist chant. there's a scene of extreme violence near the end (speaking of trigger warnings, my sister pinged me to warn me about that) which comes closer to what i imagine perpetrating or being the victim of a similar act would feel like than anyting i've read before; the whole thing is a magnificent work of empathy, and i kind of want to read it again. (like lincoln in the bardo, its polyphony gets kind of slippery from time to time, especially when characters are time traveling and skittering between multiverses.) but there's no time to reread! there's barely time to read! you'd think joe and i would be barreling through media we'd been neglecting in favor of the 3-4 hours of cable news we were mainlining before the election, but that time seems to have simply disappeared. i'm going on longer walks and spending an extra 15-30 minutes a day at the gym, but that doesn't account for it. i certainly haven't been cleaning, i haven't been writing all that much, and i haven't been napping as frequently, though saturday afternoons are still long-haul adventures. i would love to discover that i've been winking out and fighting crime in another dimension, but aside from some inexplicable thing that's gone down with my left knee and some inconvenient acne, i have no physical evidence of this double life. probably i'm underestimating my fixation on reddit.
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