Core

**There Is No Antimemetics Division** by qntm

[lots of jokes about not remembering any of this book here etc etc etc ok anyway]

For the first half of this book I was having a grand time. Some of that was nostalgia for SCP, maybe, as someone who read a bunch of those when I was like 13, but all the same the structure of a loosely connected series of short stories centering around the Antimemetics Division worked really well for me. There's even hints of a myth arc being dropped here and there — and I do like 90s/00s TV.

Some of these MOTW TV shows jump the shark once they become overly concerned with their myth arc, and unfortunately this was one of them for me. The second half is much more of a traditional, linearly told novel, and it's... kind of boring! The threat that was cool and mysterious when in the background just ended up becoming a bunch of "spooky scary stuff" to me. New concepts get introduced at a slower rate, and the ones that do get introduced aren't as exciting (less "new", more "like that old idea but Bigger"). Ending stuff: ||The whole Jesus aspect of the ending fell totally flat to me, and did not feel like it particularly cohered thematically with the stuff earlier in the book. Also, while this obviously opens me up to accusations of "just not getting it", everything basically turns to mush in the end: our heroes are fighting evil ideas that are super evil and dangerous and must be defeated with Other Big Ideas, but we obviously can't know anything about what these ideas actually *are* (because then they'd affect the reader, right); as a result you're reading about characters doing indescribable things to other indescribable things through vague allusion and metaphor and it just ends up a little silly. That's a long way of saying the plot is basically resolved with technobabble, which kinda sucks!||

In terms of character there's not much to talk about here. Love that most of the book centers on a badass middle-aged lady, and her lack of character can be pretty easily excused by the fact that she's married to her job ||(which has eaten her memories)||. It's also not what the book is focused on, and I wouldn't really *want* it to focus on it either.

In short: great premise, really fun first half, but the second half is a bit of a letdown. One of those books where I think not tying up so many loose ends would have resulted in something I'd have loved more.

3/5 ⭐

The hottest new sport in the UK is Ranked Competitive Breast Growth, where cis men (and ONLY cis men) compete to see who can grow the biggest tatas in three years. Winner gets a million dollars. Obviously this sport would appeal to lots of cis guys, and no other demographic! But if you do get exposed to not be a cis guy you're instantly booted from the competition. (Despite this, orchiectomies are considered meta.)

This should be ridiculous, but somehow it manages to seem grounded by the end. The first half is a bit like an absurd trans sitcom: four roommates all participate, and hijinks ensue, all of them basically convinced they're the trans one going undercover in the competition who must keep their cover lest the others get them booted from the competition. However, the narrative doesn't shy away from what a hostile situation this is, and it's crystal clear about what drives them all to participate. (Surely there are no parallels to reality here, it's pure fiction I'm told.) For this reason the second half shifts to be less of a sitcom and more of a (sad) character study.

I'm beginning to think I don't treat my fellow trans girls very well.

This really worked for me! I would say I found the first half more fun, but the second half was what got me hooked.

It's not perfect — for example, there's a segment that basically goes on a long tangent to summarize one of Bhatt's essays. While it's a good essay I found it a bit grating; it does get weaved in afterwards in a way I liked, but in the moment it was still very clunky.

All in all though I'd recommend it as a fun read, at least if a transfeminist sitcom sounds appealing. Quite similar to Sisters of Dorley but also distinct enough to have its own things to say. If the next book was already out I'd be reading it immediately

Solid! Sjokkerende tilgjengelig om Hegel. Føler jeg fikk mye ut av denne, og grobunn til mange tanker. Føles rart å binge en bok om Hegel, men denne slukte jeg. Jeg har likevel noen litt kritiske notes.

Jeg syns kapittelet om identitetspolitikk ble litt flåsete. Det blir alltid rart når man på vis sidestiller gryende fascisme med "woke sensur". Jeg tror ikke tanken var å sette likhetstegn som sådan, bare at de gror ut av like individualistiske impulser, men jeg tror det svekker kapittelet.

Jeg så noen andre nevne at å snakke så mye om Russland-Ukraina og ikke Israel-Palestina virker feigt. Jeg forstår det sånn at mesteparten av boka ble skrevet før 7. oktober, men det kaster fortsatt en skygge over boka, det blir synlig i sitt fravær. Her motstår jeg å si noe om negasjon.

Vil likevel anbefale boka varmt; spesielt de tidlige kapitlene som gir en oppsummering av anerkjennelse, ånd, frihet og historie var svært gode. De retta på mange feiltagelser jeg hadde gjort om Hegel! Jeg tror spesielt han blir utilgjengelig på engelsk, "ånd" er altså bare et langt bedre begrep enn "mind/spirit". Alt gir mye mer mening når man ikke tror dette omhandler noe sært og overnaturlig som styrer individuelle mennesker.

Jeg tror jeg kommer til å plukke opp mer av Hverven — jeg sleit litt med det siste kapittelet om natur, og paradoksalt nok betyr det at jeg vil lese Hvervens bok om naturfilosofi for å fordype meg litt mer i det.

disappointed :(

(Note: I read the version that's up on AO3 through chapter 15. The print edition is unavailable at the moment and I have no idea how different it is. Probably not very!?!)/

The five stages of Dorley:

I wouldn't go to Dorley -> ok fine I would go to Dorley -> oh. I see. I already did go to Dorley -> wait was RLT worse than Dorley -> I should get a novelty mug that says "I was castrated and all I got was this novelty mug"

Dorley Hall ends up a surprisingly rich lens to view our experiences through. That's not all it is, obviously, but the trauma they share and bond over—it hits. The medical trauma is something I both appreciated and dread reading more of in future books (which I will be reading why yes I did jump straight into chapter 16 oooops!!).

Really curious where this treatment of gender is going! Their gender is coercively reassigned yet they embrace it; I'm chewing on it still but there is some parallel to be drawn with the Janice Raymond "medically constructed female" line of screed, maybe — after all, they really were moulded into women in an evil laboratory against their wills (initially, anyway). But of course I should emphasise the text doesn't buy into that, because it's actually written by someone who understands nuance and empathy (shocking!).

The easy answer is "well they were all basically eggs so they're happy with it in the end" but the text explicitly rejects this explanation (and rightfully so). Yet it obviously doesn't buy into John Money nonsense either—many do "wash out" of the "programme", never to be heard from again.

So what it leaves you with is a group of women who are emphatically women (mostly) who cannot be labelled cis/trans, who view their old selves as truly dead (with a heaping of trauma attached), whose genders were coercively assigned to them and yet they accepted them. I think what I like about this is that on one hand it *is* analogous to (a) transsexual experience, and you can read it simply qua analogy, but it's obviously not *just* that; there are many points where this analogy breaks down and it asks you to look past the analogy. I don't have a conclusion to this, yet, and I don't think the text will ever hand me one. But I'm excited to see yet more nuance added to this in the later books to make it even harder to read. I love this aspect, basically.

Suffice it to say the characters are also lots of fun and I want more of them; I'm excited for where the plot is going; and I'm dreading a bit that the pacing is already quite uneven, and since this is a web serial I just know it'll get worse. Oh well, I'm a Dorleypilled true believer in need of novelty mugs now, I'll read it anyway :)

don't tell gazi I dnf'd this

Review to come, I think, but *The Third Sex* was utterly electrifying, edifying, rage-inducing. Excellent and essential work.

A significant improvement to Leviathan Wakes! Excited to move right to book 3

The more I think about this one the more I'm convinced that this book rules.

This book has been labelled dystopian, and although that is true on the surface, this book is less interested in exploring and warning of a potential future and more interested in the construction of identity. The premise is that forty people wake up in a cage with no memory as to how that came to be: specifically, thirty-nine women and one child. No one knows the child's parents; no one knows her name; she is only the Child, and she has no memory of the previous world: she only knows the cage, the thirty-nine women, and the (male) guards that watch over them but never speak. Those in the cage have no purpose, there is nothing to do, and their survival is guaranteed: when sick they are handed pills, when hungry they are given food. The novel begins as the Child begins to think, and is presented as her memoir. From the very beginning the Child understands herself as fundamentally different from every other human she can see: she is not like the other women in the cage, and she is not like the guards. The central question the novel is asking, then, isn't "how did this situation occur?"—the book tells you right off the bat that there will be no easy answers—it's "how does a person develop into a subject with no name, no gender, no mirror, no room for human activity, and no purpose?"

If that question sounds interesting to you I think this is absolutely worth a read. If you go in just based on the sci-fi premise however I think it'll be disappointing. But it's a short book, and after sitting on it for a few days I'm convinced I need to reread it. The author was a psychoanalyst and it shows, so I'm curious how much more I'd get out of this after deep-diving into psychoanalysis some more.

This series just fell off a cliff. Every issue I had with ARC 1 was ratcheted up to 11.

ARC 1 ends on a cliffhanger. I had some problems with that ending—it was quite abrupt and underwritten—but it at least did a good job setting up higher stakes for the next volume, right? Right?? Not if the main character decides "well that seems scary" and completely abandons every. single. story thread from the previous book in favour of wandering the countryside. I think there are two reasons this happened. (1) In the afterword the author says this was mostly a worldbuilding exercise for him, and from that perspective this makes sense. We get to see more of the world! Unfortunately the rest of the world is utterly lifeless and boring, just Generic Medieval Village #327 followed by Generic Medieval Village #328. Riveting!! And (2) I'm making an assumption, but I do not think the author knew where the plot was going at this point. He'd written himself into a corner and web serial disease set in because it still had to get updates.

Here's what an average chapter of Mother of Learning ARC 2 feels like:

I decided to visit the Sneezing Tiger web. We spent three weeks negotiating, but eventually they gave me a list of other webs that could be interested: The Fluffed Pillows, the Tasty Snacks, the Spears of Destiny, and the Dingleberry Dunces. I had some time to kill in the meantime, so I just kinda wandered around and explored the dungeon. In the dungeon I found a [LONG BORING LIST].

I can't be bothered to make up another list. Why does this book seem to think I want long lists so bad?!? My eyes are glazing over!

A new villain gets introduced in this volume, to replace the one that had been set up and then completely ignored from ARC 1. (Maybe you could say he "haunts the narrative". I think that's giving too much credit.) When I say introduced I mean he finally gets a speaking role about 70% of the way in... and he talks like an anime villain. And then he goes magic berserk mode and guess what: he talks like EVEN MORE of an anime villain. This is not a believable person; this is a miserable bag of tropes. If you want to read this, you will have to accept that it has some of the most uninspired villains you'll ever read.

When we hit the last two chapters, the plot chases after the main character and DEMANDS that something interesting happens, so we get an extremely abrupt lead-up to an ending cliffhanger. Yippee! The last two chapters did not need the 26 preceding chapters to happen—sure, there is some cause and effect, but it's deeply inelegant and inefficient. This reveal/cliffhanger should have happened halfway through the book, if not earlier: the only things stopping it from happening were the vague power level of the protagonist, and whether the protagonist would stop being an idiot. (In the end he is forced to stop being an idiot.)

This volume is an utter failure of serial writing. To set up so many plot threads—to build some momentum to carry the reader forward!—only to totally abandon them in favour of exploring a totally different area of the world that feels totally lifeless: why? And then, when we finally get to see some familiar environs, still nothing happens: this restart I'm learning X; now I'm learning Y; why? There is no plan. There is no momentum. There is no real plot: things are just happening. I do not understand the acclaim this book gets online; the standards are significantly lower for web serials, sure, but I don't really think anyone actually preferred the total aimlessness of this volume. This really could have been good—all the pieces were there—if only it had actually been edited for publication, so that a red pen could have cut 80% of this.

she really was back! a bit predictable but also a lot of fun. a lot of readers seem to hate Carrie and I think they simply don't get it. why didn't she and Nicki kiss though

Full review:

This was a fun one! Keeping up the TJR streak of fun enjoyable books for me (we're ignoring Malibu Rising).

This is a book about tennis, but it's really a book about desire. The premise is that of Carrie Soto as a world-renowned tennis star—the best there ever was—whose status as The Best suddenly becomes threatened, making her return to the sport despite her old age (for tennis... she's in her late thirties), with her dad as her coach. So in one sense, this is an underdog story: the entire world assumes she can't come back. In another sense it really isn't, as Soto's goal initially isn't to take back her title, it's to keep it. This alone makes Carrie an abrasive character: she has already proved herself, and what she's fighting for isn't to prove herself, not really, she's already done that: her impetus to come back is to stop someone else from overshadowing her legacy. More than that, she insists on bluntly stating what she believes (i.e. that she is The Best), and she will use any advantage she can get her hands on to win. This all makes following her comeback a lot of fun! I also never found her unlikable, though a lot of readers seem to.

Although on the surface it shares characteristics with sports anime of all things (and a hint of Marty Supreme, if it was actually about ping pong), it's really a grounded story. For me, that comes down to her relationship with her dad Javier (who is also her coach), which acts as the gravitational pull of the novel. We get the play-by-play of many tennis matches (and it is exciting! at least if you like tennis), but I think each and every one really characterises and reflects Carrie, Javier, and their relationship. (There is nominally a romance here, too, albeit a boring one.)

TJR ranking: Atmosphere > Daisy Jones & the Six > Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo > Carrie Soto is Back > Malibu Rising

This was... okay! It's firmly middle-grade, which isn't something I really seek out, but I did have enough fun with it that I ended up reading it in about a day (it's not very long). The first half is a bit boring to be honest, not because things aren't happening -- the plot is moving at a rapid pace if anything -- but because none of it is all that compelling and the characters are a bit dull. Things do take a bit of a turn around the halfway point (when Steve gets bit): Darren turns out to be a real piece of work and becomes a far more compelling character, the horror elements come into focus, and there is this growing sense that a point of no return has been crossed both psychologically and materially. Darren also has quite a lot of agency, which is refreshing seeing as he's also a total dunce.

It's pretty obvious what it's all leading up to, though, but I am in my late twenties reading a middle-grade book so this seems unfair to hold against it. The book ends in a pretty interesting spot, and for the most part it manages to get there by letting the characters move in ways that feel natural rather than to have them pushed around by the plot. I don't think I'll be picking up more of these any time soon, but at the same time I can see myself reading these next time I'm in bed with a fever.

Can a child be ontologically evil? Steve is a dumb name for a vampire hunter.

I'm a fool, I thought this was standalone... and the second book isn't out... Anyway, this was fun! It took me a while to get into - the world is def not a standard fantasy world, so the first few chapters I was mostly trying to get my bearings, and it also spends the first 30% or so in a quest fantasy-ish mode, which is not my favourite. On top of that I was also slumping when I picked it up so that was an unfortunate combo, oops. But once it got going for me - around when Lumi's team starts crossing the south pole and when Alrik reaches Canalas - it became a breeze to read. There's still a lot of worldbuilding, but I felt like I got more room to breathe as a reader to really invest in these characters.

Which I did! The characters actually surprised me multiple times, which is something I look for - especially Lumi, who I ended up really liking. She's allowed to be rather unlikable at times: she realises multiple times she's fucked something up, she often tells herself she has different motivations than what really seems to be driving her, and she will often say something without thinking it through under duress; in short she ended up feeling really well-developed. The frank way her narrative handled sexuality also felt believable and refreshing. I liked the other POV, Alrik, too, but he didn't surprise me as much (aside from the scene when he ends up shooting a robber in the head, which also sets the tone for the rest of his narrative) - but being a biology nerd who cares about conservation made him easy for me to root for, and that's a cool perspective you don't often get in fantasy.

Aside from that the prose is generally good - in a lot of self-pub I pick up I tend to notice it often, but not so here. My biggest criticism there is really on editing: I think I tend to notice these things more than most, as they often pull me out, but I noticed a fair few typos; most egregious was probably one in the first chapter (iirc) where the verb to a very important sentence was missing. (edit: I can't find this now so I might be making this up. my bad if so...) I generally noticed these issues less as the book went on though. (Other nitpicks: things like interludes and epilogues didn't have separate chapter headings in my edition, instead being inserted in the middle of another chapter; and I wish there had been a map.)

By the end a fair few plotlines are still not resolved, leaving a lot of room open for things to explore in a sequel. The ending also leaves the cast in a really interesting place and I'd like to see where it goes from there (when the sequel does come out): now that they've ousted the Crown and Ketterman has left, they're left to pick up the pieces, so I'm hoping to see them try to find out how to rebuild Cinura. In short: took me a while to get into, but by the end it was a lot of fun! I'll probably pick up the sequel when it comes out (TBR willing).

"I miss how we used to talk as teenagers, talk through songs, borrowed emotions, borrowed words and eyes. The words were just lying there, common property. We just kind of picked them up. We picked up all kinds of things from one another, whole jokes and beliefs and pieces of our personality. We did it without thinking, a kind of psychic communism. We had no shame."

I wish I could put the entire last chapter in this review. It's very very good and was downright healing to read.

A/S/L is a weird literary book about three teenagers who made games together online, drifted apart, and then all grew up to be mentally ill trans women. (Tale as old as time.) It's a pretty slow read: most of the page count is spent on their three storylines as adults slowly converging, and that sort of storytelling can quickly slow the pace of a book to a crawl. I think to many readers it probably would feel overly slow, and from an objective point of view it probably *is* a bit bloated in the middle, but all the same I was absolutely absorbed by it and read it in two days. It's a flawed book, but it also manages to profoundly touch on the intersection of transness, weird internet communities, and online friendships.

Another factor that probably plays into how absorbed I was by this book is how much I saw pieces of myself in all three protagonists, something I really find pretty rare: I quite rarely relate strongly to a character, but here some of their mental tics and overall ways of thinking just hit uncomfortably close to home, especially Sash and Lilith. (Abraxa less so, but also I feel like I've *genuinely* met and had long conversations with women just like Abraxa.)

This made the end of the book absolutely cutting, it's sat with me since I finished the book. Lilith's forgiveness of Sash, the way she sees both the good and the bad, was beautiful and hard-hitting; I reread it for this review and it just got me crying again.

"But there were so many years since then, and I realised you had been eaten up by that for all of them. And suddenly I was seeing it through your eyes all over again: a world where all the power was yours, and all the guilt, too.

"Do you really think you're that important? Why do you think that?

" [...] I don't think we get free by settling all our debts to one another. I'm not a debt to settle; neither are you. We get free by something else: by recognising that what we do to one another is forever. We are what we do to one another. I am what you did to me -- you are what I did to you. Despite everything, I like who I am. I hope you do, too."

Stopping myself from putting the entire last chapter in the review because that's silly. But yes I liked it a lot. I liked spending time with all three protagonists even though they were all fucked up in different ways because in the end this book isn't mopey, isn't about how their lives are sad and meaningless; it's incredibly hopeful.

Who do I recommend this book to? I dunno. Mentally ill trans women who like weird art and weird games and know what "A/S/L" means and also wish they didn't know what "A/S/L" means, probably? Which isn't a huge portion of the population but at the same time I'm thankful I'm in it now.

A little update: I read this book in, what, June? I still think about it now over half a year later. I'll re-read it this year I think. Love love love it.

An incredibly fun read to pick up during a bit of downtime. Some questions are more fun than others (I love the physics-y ones the most), but they're all so short that they never outstay their welcome.

No saving grace except for a sci-fi plot generator, and even that is only in the first couple of parts. Please, I'm begging you, read better books. This won't teach you anything. 

Mr. Harari writes tripe for dumb rich people.

Finished A Shadow of All Night Falling (Dread Empire #1), and it's what you might call... a solid 2/5! And yet, I'm definitely going to read more Glen Cook down the line. 

The world was pretty bland and the pacing was downright bizarre, but there's something there that has the potential to be great. The last 30 pages, after a whole lot of meandering, suddenly turned into something genuinely compelling, as our main characters showed their worst sides when facing their own corpses, and one will have to be left behind without resurrection. There's also several other, potentially more interesting books happening in the sidelines of this one, which is absolutely bizarre. There's genuinely a chapter in here detailing 100 years of history in 10 pages - and it's a more compelling narrative arc than the actual story Cook is telling!

I really wish we'd actually spent more time breathing with the characters, because when we finally did right at the end it was great. But so much of the story was told as summary, with important plot points being relayed so tersely that the stakes are gone. The kidnapping at the very core of the second half of the book happens off-screen - Cook, that's good drama, why won't you show it to me 😭

Very enjoyable, simply due to the amount of concepts it's willing to throw at you. The tendency not to explain them, but to let you extrapolate from them what you will is exactly what I want from this kind of ideas-driven sci-fi. While hard sci-fi tends to explain in minute detail how everything works, PKD is perfectly happy to throw out psionics, inertials, coin-operated doors, half-life, etc. without explaining at all the whats and hows and whys. I'm still not really sure what the inciting incident is about, but I have my ideas, and that's how I'd like to keep it!

On the downside, the characters are all incredibly lifeless, and I didn't care about a single one. For one, Joe seemed generally inconsistent to me - he ended up caring a lot more about Glen than I was first led to believe, considering he seemed quite severely underpaid. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think PKD doesn't really care about writing strong characters, and for the genre he's working in, that's fine by me.

(Finally, I'd like to add that the silliest concept in this book - everything requiring small amounts of coins to function - is basically the utopia imagined by web3 crypto enthusiasts. I don't know if PKD expected this concept to ever be more than a fun joke, but it ended up being the most prescient part of the book!)

Covid read #3 – which reminded me why I mostly stopped reading YA.

I'm glad the genre in general is very focused on dealing with queerness and mental health (or at least this segment of it is). It's why I still pick these up now and then. However, the characters tend to be pretty flat for me; all their nuances are made very explicit in the text, leaving no room for me to actually grow curious about them. I don't think this is really a failing of the genre itself, it's just my taste having changed.

On the other hand, that flaw is actually perfect when I'm sick, so it was still enjoyable!

Covid read #2 - probably the most fast paced book I'll read this year!

Picked up as a light read while getting through Covid – perfectly fit for purpose!

Maybe a little too nudge-nudge-wink-wink for me at times with the meta jokes and trope subversion (which I suppose is what I signed up for), but the characters were enjoyable enough in a sort of breezy YA way that it was still a nice read.

note: i expected to hate this

Juvenile writing style, tell don't show. Reads like a list of tropes w/o any fat and texture to actually round it out into something real and authentic 

Difficult to follow over audio

Maybe I'll try again later, but right now, this is just too similar to NP and CwT for me to enjoy it, even though I really liked those books.