bimo | Reading

And that's half a year's reading down! Here's the latest:

( 39.Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe )

( 40. Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer )

( 41. Unseen Universe by Caroline Harper )

( 42. Mrs, Presumed Dead by Simon Brett )

( 43. The Pursuit of Grouchiness: Oscar the Grouch's Guide to Life by Oscar the Grouch )

( 44. The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay )

( 45. One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America by Gene Weingarten )

Current Mood: okay

alierak in

dw_maintenance

We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

oracne

My schedule is finalized! I didn't list participants in case there were changes.

Who will I see at Readercon next month?

The Works of P. Djèlí Clark

Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT

Our Guest of Honor P. Djèlí Clark rounded out his first decade as a published author with a Nebula and a Locus for his fantasy police procedural novel, The Master of Djinn, and both those awards plus a British Fantasy Award for his monster-hunting novella Ring Shout. His short story "How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub" is short-listed for the Hugo this year. As a History professor at University of Connecticut, he investigates the pathways leading from West African storyteller/poets (griots, a.k.a. djèlí) to the American abolitionist movement. Help us celebrate the works of our honored guest!

The Purposes of Memorable Insults in Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 5:00 PM EDT

Some of the most quotable lines in science fiction and fantasy are zingers. Wit can do a lot to build a character, a world, and a universe, and has the ability to either support or undermine reader expectations. This panel aims to explore and elaborate on the use of wit—and especially takedowns—in literature, exposing how a verbal jab can serve as more than just a punchline.

Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing [I'm moderating this one]

Salon G/H Friday, July 18, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT

It's becoming increasingly common to hear of authors whose self-published work was so successful that they were picked up by a traditional publisher. But what of the authors who have gone the other way, by turning their backs on traditional publishing and going into self-publishing? Panelists will survey the varying reasons for making this transition, how authors have navigated it, and what this might say about the state of publishing overall.

Kaffeeklatsch: Victoria Janssen

Suite 830 Friday, July 18, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT

Meet the Pros(e) party

Salon F Friday, July 18, 2025, 10:15 PM EDT

Program participants are assigned to tables with a roughly equal number of conferencegoers and other participants, and then table placements are scrambled at regular intervals so that everyone gets to meet a new set of people in a small-group setting. Think of it as a low-key sort of speed dating where you need never be the sole focus of anyone's attention, and the goal is just to get to know some cool Readerconnish people. Please note that this event will include a bar and is mask-optional, unlike most other programming.

The Works of Cecilia Tan [I'm moderating this one]

Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT

Our Guest of Honor, Cecilia Tan, has a publication history that spans Asimov's, Absolute Magnitude, Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, and Best American Erotica, among others. Writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy, especially as they intersect with erotica and romance, she is also the founder of Circlet Press, an independent publisher that specializes in speculative erotica. Her own writing earned a Lifetime Achievement for Erotica in 2014 from Romantic Times magazine. She also contributes to America's other pastime, baseball, in her role as Publications Director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Come hear our panel discuss Cecilia's many talents and accomplishments.

Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies [I'm moderating this one]

Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT

In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?

The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction

Create / Collaborate Saturday, July 19, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT

In an article of the same name (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/endless-appetite-fanfiction), Elizabeth Minkel discussed how "2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides." Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?

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books

Babylon White by Kit Sun Cheah

The grand conclusion! Spoilers for earlier books ahead.

( Read more... )

selenak

Aka the series which was delayed for years, with the result that there is much preemptive sceptism. Having watched the first three episodes which got dropped a few days ago, I very much like what I'm seeing so far. The way the series provides a distinct feeling of a place and people reminds me of what the show Ms Marvel did with the Pakistani community in New Jersey - in this case, Riri Williams comes from the Chicago South Side, as does the director, google tells me, and that's where she returns to in the series' pilot.

( Spoilers could make an Iron Suit in a cave, but would need the cash to be brought to the cave first )

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Sylt

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books

The day after finishing The Traitor Baru Cormorant I had to rush over to the library to pick up book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, which I finished earlier today.

Spoilers for The Traitor Baru Cormorant below!

The second book of a fantasy series of any kind often bears a very difficult burden. It is most often the place where the scope of the story grows significantly. A conflict which before was local to the protagonist's home and surrounding area may expand, often to the extent of the known world. New players are often added to the cast, bigger and scarier problems and challenges arise. The protagonist may have gone up in the world, wielding new power and influence, with new responsibilities. As a result, this is where many series lose their footing; a tightly-woven book or season 1 may give way to a muddled, watered down part 2 as the writers struggle to juggle this expanded focus.

The Monster suffers from none of those things. It is the place where Baru's story expands—in The Traitor, her focus was almost entirely on Aurdwynn; it was the full field of play and outside players mattered only as they influenced events on Aurdwynn. In The Monster, Baru has become a true agent of the Imperial Throne of Falcrest, and with these new powers, the entire field of the empire is opened up for her play, and it is fascinating to watch.

In The Traitor, Baru was narrowly focused on managing the situation in Aurdwynn; everything she did was to that end. In The Monster, Baru can do whatever she wants, and we get to see her finally on the open field. Even where she flounders and flails, it's delightful to watch the machinations of her mind constantly at work. Her cleverness rows against her bursts of sentimentality to produce some impressively chaotic effects, but she is as slippery as an eel to pin down, even when her rivals think they've gotten the best of her.

( Read more... )

selenak

As far as musical biopics go, they tend to be more of a miss than a win in many cases, with the plus side that at least you, potential watcher, get to listen to some good music even if the script fails. There are exceptions, i.e. films where both the music is good and the film doesn’t feel like a visualized wikipedia entry, for example, Love & Mercy, which escapes the formula by picking two distinctly different and important eras of Brian Wilson’s life instead of his whole life, with 1960s Brian on the verge of creating his masterpiece and having a mental breakdown played by Paul Dano and 1980s Brian, in the power of a ruthless exploitative doctor but about to freed via encountering his second wife, by John Cusack. The performances are great, the different eras are poignantly commenting on each other, and even were Brian Wilson a fictional character, the film would be worth watching. If Love & Mercy wins for originality with the template, Walk the Line (about Johnny Cash) wins for doing the formula expertly, in fact so well it became endlessly copied and parodied thereafter. James Mangold, who directed Walk the Line to a lot of commercial and critical success back in the day, waited for near two decades before going near another musical biopic again, but he did last year, resulting in A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan, which courtesy of the Mouse channel I have now watched.

( You who are so good with words and at keeping things vague )

All in all: good, very good, though not great. But it’s the first film in a while where I absolutely want to have the soundtrack.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: On the train

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books

I don't actually remember where I saw Catriona Ward's Sundial recommended, but it was somewhere and convincing enough to get it on my TBR. I finished the audiobook this week so it's time to reflect.

Sundial is a domestic psychological thriller which focuses on the relationship between the protagonist Rob and her eldest daughter Callie. Or at least, that's what the novel summary posits. A good 50% or more of the book is actually about Rob's youth and her relationship with her childhood family, primarily her twin sister, Jack. I didn't get that at first, which led to me being slightly frustrated by the length of the "flashback" sections until I realized that they were at least half the true focus of the story.

Ward excels in capturing the petty toxicity of a domestic environment gone sour. Especially deftly handled are the ways in which a partner can wound in such seemingly mundane ways. Many of the exchanges between Rob and her husband, Irving, come off as completely innocuous to an outsider, but to the two people in the relationship, who have the context for these seemingly nothing interactions, the full cruelty of them is on display. This adds completely believably to the tension between Rob and Callie, who has long favored her father, and who sees her mother's responses as hysterical overreactions, because she doesn't have the context that Rob does. Ward also very neatly portrays a truly vicious marriage, where both parties have given up pretending they want to be together, at least to each other, and where the entire relationship has become an unending game of oneupsmanship, trying to get one over on your spouse.

Adding to this suffocating atmosphere is Callie, a very strange 12-year-old who is starting to exhibit some very troubling behavior, particularly in her interactions with her 9-year-old sister, Annie. Rob has always struggled to connect with Callie—in contrast with Irving, who happily spoils her to force Rob to be the bad guy enforcing boundaries—but when Callie is thought to have attempted to poison Annie with Irving's diabetes medication, Rob decides it's time she and Callie have a real heart-to-heart.

So she takes Callie on a mother/daughter trip to Rob's childhood home, Sundial, an isolated family property out in the Mojave desert.

( Read more... )

oracne

The Big Bundle of Queer Awesomeness is 100 books for $100 - you can also scroll down on this page for the smaller bundles, sorted by genre.

Itch.io gives authors a larger portion of the royalties, which is why I've been giving them some promotion. My lesbian erotica reprint collection, "Spicy Sapphic Treats," is in the Contemporary and Historical bundle as well as the big one.

selenak

Real Life (not mine, personally, mine is just very busy) in terms of global politics being a continued horrorshow, I find myself dealing with it in vastly different ways in terms of fandom - either reading/watching/listening to things (almost) entirely unconnected - for example, this YouTube channel by a guy named Elliot Roberts whose reviews of all things Beatles as well as of musical biopics of other folk I can hearitly recommend for their enthusiasm (or scorn, cough, Bohemian Raphsody, cough), wit and charm - , or consuming media that is very much connected to Current Events. For example: about two weeks ago there was a fascinating event here in Munich where an Israeli author, Yishai Sarid, who is currently teaching Hebrew Literature at Munich University was introduced via both readings from several of his novels, many, though not all of which are translated into German, and via conversations. While the excerpts of already published novels (and the conversations around them) certainly were captivating, and led me to reading one of them, Limassol, which is a well written Le Carréan thriller in the Israel of 2009 (when it was published) context), the novel he talked about which I was most curious about hasn't been translated into German yet, though it has been translated into English: The Third Temple.

This was was originally published in 2015 and evidently has been translated into English in 2024, with an afterword by Yishai Saraid in which he basically says "people thought I was kidding or writing sci fi in 2015. I wish. I could see where this is going then, and now you can, too". If I tell you that a reviewer back in the day according to google described the novel as "if the staff of Haaretz and Margaret Atwood had a child", you may guess what it's about. I will say that if the staff of Haaretz and Margaret Atwood had a child, I wouild expect it to be a female rather than a male narrator, but yeah, other than this. ( A spoilery review ensues. )

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Location: Munich

astrogirl

Look, I finally, finally finished my

genprompt_bingo card for Round 27! Now to figure out what to do with the card for round 28 that I've already had sitting here untouched for a couple of months...

Title: At Least You Don't Have Food Poisoning
Fandom: RimWorld
Characters/Relationships: OCs
Rating: G, or I guess PG for some strong language if anybody actually cares about that.
Summary: Sometimes life on the Rim sucks.
Tags: bad day, looming mental break, first person, double drabble
Length: 200 words
Author's Notes: Written for Gen Prompt Bingo for the prompt "We're Surrounded!" I had no idea what to do with this one, until I realized I could use my latest video game obsession. About time RimWorld gave me something back for all those hours I've spent mostly failing at it!

At Least You Don't Have Food Poisoning

Current Mood: busy

marycatelli in

books

Kill the Villainess, Vol. 2 by Haegi

The story continues.

( Read more... )

astrogirl

Dear Just Married Creator,

First off, let me assure you that my tastes are really broad. I like everything from heart-warming fluff to full-bore tragedy, and the whole spectrum in between. I also tend to be very character-focused, so while plot is fine and there are some requested prompts here that could make for fun plotty stuff, I do regard it as entirely optional and I can be 100% happy with, say, fic that's nothing but two characters talking to each other, or that's largely just introspection. Any rating is fine, but when it comes to sex scenes, I prefer them to feel like they're strongly based in the characters, rather than the characters mostly just being there as a vehicle for the porn, if that makes sense. Honestly, I care less about precisely what they're be doing in bed than about whether they feel like themselves while they're doing it.

( general likes, DNWs, etc )

THE REQUESTS

I've included a few thoughts and general comments here, although I think overall the requested tags lists should provide enough in the way of prompts, and should speak for themselves pretty well, so I mostly haven't discussed them in detail. I will add here that you can feel absolutely free to interpret any of those prompts in any way you like. Stretch 'em, subvert 'em, come at 'em from weird angles or in ways that only technically fit... or play them absolutely straight. It's all good!

( Disco Elysium )

( Doctor Who (1963) )

( Doctor Who (2005) )

( Farscape )

( Gravity Falls )

( The Orville )

marycatelli in

books

Redwall by Brian Jacques

The start of the series.

( Read more... )

astrogirl

Here's my offering for Into a Bar this time out! Although the community mod is mostly incommunicado for a few days, so it'll be a little while before it shows up there.

Title: We Don't Talk About That Here
Fandom: The Orville/Gravity Falls
Characters/Relationships: Sheriff Blubs, Isaac, Blubs/Durland, mentioned Claire/Isaac
Rating: General Audiences. Content warning for police abuses treated entirely non-seriously. Also contains spoilers for both shows.
Summary: Isaac wants information about interdimensional rifts so he can get home. Sheriff Blubs just wants to uphold the law. And eat peanuts.
Tags: Gravity Falls post-canon, the Orville post-S3, interdimensional travel, cops, the Never Mind All That Act, mentioned Claire/Isaac, crossover
Length: ~1600 words
Author's Notes: This was written for A Ficathon Goes Into a Bar, the challenge where you pick a character and have to write them going into a bar and meeting a randomly chosen character from one of your other fandoms. Sometimes, you get character combinations that lead to fascinating interactions and new insights into both participants. And then sometimes you get... this.

We Don't Talk About That Here

Current Mood: accomplished

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bimo

March 2025

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Postcards from Oz - AU Edition

Reading

June Book Log

Rebuilding journal search again

Readercon 2025 Schedule

Babylon White

Ironheart (TV Series) Episodes 1 - 3

Collecting prompts for a X-Men unconventional pairings Fic Meme/Drabble-a-Thon

celebrity20in20 Round 15

"The Monster Baru Cormorant" by Seth Dickinson

Film Review: A Complete Unknown

"Sundial" by Catriona Ward

Pride Book Bundles

Meanwhile...

Well, That Took A While.

Kill the Villainess, Vol. 2

Dear Just Married Creator

Redwall

So, Here They Are In The Bar

Profile

March 2025