Fictional Fans

What I’ve Read

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher – Another Sworn Soldier spooky mystery with a creepy cave and inhuman intelligences. I liked it, but I don’t think it’s as interesting as the first two. I’ll probably re-read to see if I continue to hold that opinion later. Kingfisher is always a good re-read.

Latchkey by Goldkirk – Long and self-indulgent Batfam fic focus on a young Tim Drake. None of the bad things have happened yet – Jason Todd makes friends with Tim, and Tim’s parents are awful and he’s rescued. The writing is good and there’s probably more I can say, but it just makes me feel content to see someone recovering from a bad situation.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh – A magical school story (NOT my thing) where the main character is an intelligent administrator and instructor who’s also a 38 year old woman in a slow rolling life crisis (TOTALLY my thing.) Honestly, this is a great book and the only failure of the work is mine – I have no tolerance for the kind of Potterstalgic Anglophilia that permeates some magical school stories, and so I would have never read this book if my book club hadn’t suggested it. I am not immune to foolish choices. It’s legitimately good and puts enough work into showing the foulness of English hierarchical society that I could actually trust Tesh to not brush over it. I really enjoyed the main character’s sheer unrelenting busy-ness and the complexities of running a larger school appealed, and the way the school kind of eats her until something breaks. 

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (Scholomance Book 1) – Also an author I trust to look at a magical school and then take a hatchet to the hierarchical bullshit built into it! This is a re-read and I enjoyed it a great deal. This book is about capitalism and hierarchy and aristocracy and all the ways El Higgins grows to realize that she’s rather build something new than choose a safe path. Book club picked this series, and the Incandescent, because we tend to do better with a quarterly book club meeting and we need something meaty and complex. These books are going to make a fascinating set of comparisons. This book has zero teachers in it.

What I’m Reading

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik (Scholomance 2) – This book is doing numbers on my head in the scarcity mindset compared to the last book. El finally gets her hands on some RESOURCES and it changes the whole game and also I fully related to how resentful she is of the past ages she spent scraping by. One of the best elements of this book series is El going from an outsider with no leverage and a deep fear of incurring debts she can’t repay, to the linchpin of a vast network of people willingly supporting each other for the good of it. She’s not there yet, but she’s laying down the foundations. It’s wonderful.

Apparently Sir Cameron Needs to Die – so far, so good. Cute and funny, more horny than I realized. Do people like sprayed edges on a book? I find them oddly smelly, and it’s a glue-bound paperback, so it feels a bit like putting your money on a nice paint job for a beater car.

What I’ll Read Next
Viriconium

Wednesday Work in Progress – Happy Sock Madness to all who observe! I have one third of a sock done and I am starting the other before I settle down and do the colorwork heel that is currently intimidating me. The qualifier pattern is called Newspaper - - and while it’s not actually that hard to knit if you’ve got good colorwork technique (and I do) the heel style (flap and gusset) is not my preferred mode and I have to secure myself a few hours to really dig into it. Hopefully I can get far enough that get a substantial amount done over the weekend.