i don't storm, i sunshower

nothing new under the sun. weird combination of shit in this post but then again do you ever expect anything else from me?

first up: book review. i was tempted by jennifer weiner's the griffin sisters' greatest hits because it's a book about music and also the main characters are from philly - weiner is local and i've read a couple of her books before (a very long time ago!) so i trusted her to not make me miserable in that regard. it's about two sisters who become a smash hit overnight in the early 2000s, the death that they each, separately, blame themselves for, and the one sister's daughter, who is, love and light to her, a stubborn little terror and goes to track down her aunt in alaska when said aunt really doesn't want to be found. it is impossible to read this story and not side with the younger sister, i think. the book compellingly revolves around their bandmate's death and the band's breakup in a way that really keeps you on the hook as to what happened, but then when you finally do find out, ZOE IS UNQUESTIONABLY THE BAD GUY HERE and i very quickly lose any sympathy i had for her. like girl i know what it's like to have a younger sibling way more cool and talented than you but never once have i stooped to that level. the sisters reconcile and eventually start singing together again but idk, if i were cassie, my trust in my sister would be so so broken. 

it was christmas this week and that meant hanging out with my extended family. specifically, it meant hanging out with my fourteen year old cousin, who casually dropped that she was bisexual into conversation when i wasn't expecting it and who i taught to use ao3. (she used it to look up f/f arcane fics. i'm delighted.) she's also been getting into kpop so i showed her some "older" groups (twice, red velvet, dreamcatcher... groups that were established but certainly not vintage when i was first listening to kpop in 2017!) and where to find dance tutorials and filled her in on some of the survival show lore. wow wow wow. she's like, a real teenager. i remember the day she was born. 

okay, and also - like, if you've been on the internet recently you know that everyone's been losing their mind over heated rivalry. i've watched it, WITH my heterosexual boyfriend, and we've both been liking it, as an extension of my recent fascination with hockey romance that started with the zegras trade back in June and has only grown now that the flyers somehow don't suck. but the only reason i knew about the zegras trade in the first place is because people who i followed for check please, a webcomic series about a gay NCAA player, later got into actual hockey. ngozi ukazu, the author, has been teasing her fans for the past couple of months so we've suspected that some news is coming, but we're getting a fifth volume???? after all this time???? what??????????????????? my childhood. it returns. 

did not expect the final book in the witcher novels series to include ciri meeting the knights of the round table and introducing the black plague but here we are i guess

nah real talk the universe hopping was fun! it took me a minute to settle into the plot of this one but once i did i loved it. the ending isn't actually all that happy - 2/3 of the main characters are dead, ciri is traumatized forever and lying about it, the aforementioned black plague situation, ethnic and political tensions - but geralt and yennefer got to be together, ciri is alive and has her dignity intact, we found out what emhyr var emreis' deal was, AND we continued to get that really fun meta construction storytelling. ciri's story is a folktale being reconstructed after the fact by students and mages and historical records. that bangs.

obviously i'm not DONE done with these books as there are still a couple of short story collections left but i feel very accomplished anyway.  

SO. earlier this month i got LAZY and decided yeah whatever i don't need to do blog posts about the books i read anymore right??? ahem. wrong. there's a tumblr year end books read ask game going around and i'm realizing ah shit it is actually useful for me to keep a catalog of this stuff. so in the intervening time i read at least one library book that i think i've totally forgotten about and that makes me mad! i didn't write down anywhere what this book was or what i thought of it so clearly it did not leave that much of an impression and it's not in any of the series i've been in the middle of so i don't have any help there. f

also the library procrastinated real bad on filling my holds so that didn't help either

i DID however read two books a little earlier on this year that, because i'd bought the books, i reasoned, oh i don't need to write these down, i can skip it! LIES AND FAIRYTALES. so here goes.

#1: The View from Flyover Country by Sarah Kendzior. I was expecting this to be less individual articles that all kind of say the same thing and reference each other and more like one of those affect theory ethnographies i read in college. the author made some good points i guess but the book was less "this is the unique situation midwest americans find themselves in" and more "here are my thoughts on current events. did you know i'm from st. louis?" overall underwhelmed. 

#2: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. my roommate recommended this to me forever ago, picked it up, read most of it on Halloween in the Boston Public Library main building. really quick read, philosophically very interesting what with the "no men" and "possibly not on earth" and "kept in weird not-prison" of it all, but no actual resolution or explanation of that world, it's just... the chronicle of the life of possibly the last woman on the planet. weird weird weird. i get why people enjoy it but it is too vibes based for me

both those books i bought on two separate occasions while exploring bookstores with my bf

in other life news: i am pulling back from eurovision entirely after an assembly of broadcasters voted to keep KAN in the contest. i had a hard enough time the past two years justifying this enjoyment to myself and now i think i need to step away. sucks, but like, if the ebu ever kicks israel out i'll go back. also, i've been watching heated rivalry. i've been doing this with my straight boyfriend. it is an adventure. but i think i'm more uncomfortable with the sex scenes than he is, which is kinda funny

soul music by terry pratchett sure is a book, huh. how many of these stories are going to be about something from "our world" invading the discworld to disastrous results? this time it's rock music. interdimensional guitar... there's a zombie, sort of... some really TRULY terrible puns... The Fictional Nation Of Wales... death's granddaughter goes goth... there's even some processing of grief in there. these books are so silly except for when death tries and fails to become a human and grows as a... uh... not a PERSON.... a something...? despite/because of it. 

that's all for now i have no time or energy for anything these days. also if the library would ever fill my gotdang holds that would be nice 

i turned 25 earlier this week and weirdly, it was really good. i'm going to have to stop telling people that bad things happen on my birthday because the past couple have actually been pretty nice. i spent the weekend singing with my friends and a lot of people wished me well and that's all i'm going to say about that. 

pithy title chosen to badly pander to two wildly distinct parts of the post strikes again. let's talk american teenager by nico lang, a journalism documentation of the lives of several trans kids in the US. very accessibly written and quick, and made me care about all the kids. was very clearly trying to show all aspects of life in an attempt to appeal to a hypothetical anti-trans audience but also used language that would only appeal to standard-issue democrats. not a bad thing, just an observation, i'm not totally sure what lang was trying to set out to do here. like, who are they trying to sway? 

anyway, i hope all those kids are doing okay right now. scary fucking time.

because i procrastinated a little too long about writing one book review, i now have two for you! i'm currently parked in one of my favourite coffee shops because tis the season (not enough time to go home between work and rehearsal season). i have an italian soda and my laptop and i feel like SUCH a twentysomething right now it's gorgeous. 

anyway, first finish: Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson. I found out over the course of reading this that not everyone heard about this book in high school science classes, so for the uninitiated: it's a pop science book explaining, very systematically and accessibly, the harms caused to the environment by the pesticide industry. backlash resulting from the book led to a significantly more regulated (although still extremely harmful lmaooo) pesticide industry and the creation of the EPA. so this was an interesting one to read right now! considering the, you know, gestures at The Everything. kind of scary considering that, like--i don't actually think too hard about what's in the food i eat, and maybe i should...? 

my second finish (completed on the subway less than two hours ago) is Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu. It's about a biracial girl who becomes a live-in nanny for a rich white family in new york city. it's very vibey, plot doesn't really exist and the book mostly serves to highlight all the little tensions between willa's childhood and her present and between her life and the life of her employers over the course of her time working for them. It's a little self-explorationy but in a way that didn't totally resolve. I actually really enjoyed it though, I started it and thought "oh god this is going to be so literary and i'm going to hate it" but wound up tearing through it. 

in other news, i've been going to swing dancing recently and have also... kind of sort of maybe started falling down the hockey rabbit hole. see previous posts about hockey rpf. i straight up care about hockey now and i'm going to watch my home team's first game of the season on tv if i can figure out how. i can't believe this is the kind of adult i grew up into. 

latest finish: terry pratchett's reaper man. death gets fired by his boss for having a personality, proceeds to fuck off to a farm in the middle of nowhere and make friends, meanwhile things stop dying and a wizard makes friends with other supernatural creatures to investigate... a spontaneously appearing shopping mall? 

delightfully absurd, everything happening here. WHY did death's disappearance cause a predator shaped like a modern (at the time of publication) shopping mall to appear in the discworld. 

i did like that death got a talking-to from his farm landlady about how you can't just stand by because it's the "natural" thing to do. sometimes you have to intervene to save the life of an annoying child, even if she was annoying and even if it was technically her time to die. good morality. something people in this day and age could learn from. also i liked how when his landlady buddy died, death took her out dancing and then reunited her with her ex-fiancee. 

i still haven't done any singingposting. oops. the funny thing about a 9-5 with an hourlong commute (that's about to get even longer because state republicans have decided to kill public transit here) is that it doesn't leave a lot of time for sitting down and typing up my thoughts. on weekends im just like god, i need to recover and not talk to a single human soul, and then i talk to other humans and there goes all my energy. i went on TWO hinge dates yesterday (this is a whole thing, i'm ideologically opposed to dating apps as a thing but i'm also cognizant that i've been thinking about the guy i went on 3.5 dates with in the spring who i'm currently not seeing but also that might not be Done, it's complicated, a little more than is healthy for me (or him!) so i need to think about other people, hence, the mortifying ordeal of hinge). one of them actually went well, and now i'm in this situation of, well, on the very small chance that i keep seeing this person, and then the other person i mentioned wants to pick things back up again, i'm going to have to make a Choice. i don't like to make Choices. i might choose wrong and it will haunt me forever. i'm too sentimental for this shit. 

i do however have a month and a half before that's even close to becoming a problem and lots of things can happen in a month and a half. so. whatever. my therapist will be hearing about this and its fine and im fine. 

today's finish was the long way to a small angry planet, by becky chambers. this one is sort of internet-nerd-sphere popular (i have friends who named their cats after characters from the book... and like, i met the cats first) so i figured why not check it out and i DEFINITELY get why it's populated the spheres that it has. 

the book follows the crew of the wayfarer, a sort of... i don't know how to explain it, they're like road pavers/subway tunnelers but through the fabric of spacetime - weird physics bullshit as an alternative to faster than light travel. the main characters are mostly human, but in this universe, humans are one of several assorted aliens comprising a galactic consortium. this includes lizard people, a sort of bug species that made itself mostly extinct, hivemind sloths(?), one that was described as a mix of lobsters and centaurs, and most notably for the plot, a species that prides itself on total consensus and kills anyone who disagrees with the majority. the end goal for the crew is to make it to that last group's space and drill a spacetime tunnel there to facilitate societal transportation. 

a lot of energy gets spent on worldbuilding (super interesting, actually, lots of classic cliches are there but also a few things like a totally deaf and mute species that communicates by changing the color of their skin that were more novel to me) and character development and relationships (the oddball punk mechanics were great, all the lizard characters were great although did the one lizard character have to hook up with the naive human bookkeeper because that was just a little unnecessary) but there was really no plot to speak of. it's a series of random challenges that has the crew bouncing around and meeting an ensemble of characters from around the galaxy, and then at the end of the book they arrive at their destination, there's a quick but major conflict, and then they escape mostly unscathed. and somehow there are two more books set in this universe, at least? idk. a lot of the character stuff was very "writing to appease the internet" (which sort of makes sense when you consider the book was crowdfunded) and it reads more like the novelization of a dnd campaign than a story that was always intended to be a book. despite all this, i did enjoy my experience reading it and may seek out the other books. 

also this weekend i watched both the now you see me movies in 24 hours. i <3 heists. first movie: extremely good. still thinking about it. i love the fact that they cast four actors who are always typecast (well, idk about dave franco and isla fisher quite so much, but jesse eisenberg and woody harrelson i think are very known for the exact type of character they were playing in the movie) and i LOVE the whole "steal from the rich, give to the poor" angle. it's all very leverage. second movie? eh. i don't like the new character they added to replace henley and i don't like that the robin hood angle was abandoned in favor of personal vendettas from two characters from the first movie. third movie comes out in november and i very hope it's good. 

people online are obsessed with found-familying this movie though. like i get that that's often what you get with heist crews like this (again, leverage) but part of the charm of these guys for me is that they're all dysfunctional and hate each other a little bit. everyone online makes dave franco a sad wet kitten and isla fisher the mom character. let them be fucked up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is a post about two totally unrelated things: the witcher series, and hockey rpf. 

we'll start with the thing you expect from me. the witcher series, book whatever: baptism of fire. (i am a little tipsy and a lot sad as i'm writing this, so any incoherence? i'm sorry.) in this book, ciri, geralt, and yennefer have all been separated--ciri has a gang of mall goths called the rats (and a girlfriend? like, she is canonically in a relationship with a woman?); yennefer is absent for more than half the book before getting magicked out of a statue (i won't explain any more, to leave you wondering, for fun. go read the books, they're good); and geralt goes adventuring with his buddy jaskier/dandelion, a badass archer lady called milva, a vampire, and a sort-of-nilfgaardian soldier dude named cahir whose deal i am actually SO curious about. why is he dead set on rescuing ciri? why does he insist he isn't actually from nilfgaard? tf is up with that? is it angsty? 

i'm excited for Book The Next despite the circling, repeated intimations that No One Is Going To End Up Happy. they're all going to die horribly i'm sure. this book series is so so so much about the horrors of war and how even the best intentions can fuck you over. 

ok so now i'm going to talk about hockey. late last month i opened tumblr to find my sports mutuals (i have two, one check please fandom author who also likes real hockey and one random german girl who's really into philadelphia sports who i followed for baseball gifs) losing their fucking minds about a trade that had happened. i guess these two kids (i say kids, they're... a year and two years younger than me. i'm old now??) were besties in anaheim and then got separated when the flyers took one of them and now the flyers have the other guy. hockey internet went insane and because this is a situation happening local to me (and one of them is kinda hot ngl) i decided fuck it, i'm going to get into hockey. which, for me, because i've spent most of my life at this point in fannish spaces and because some of those years were spent writing kpop rpf, meant reading fics about these kids, and then fics about other members of the philadelphia flyers, and then just other hockey rpf fics that seemed good. 

i want to be clear that i don't, like... actually ship any of these people. this was the same with kpop honestly i was writing kpop rpf but at that time they were mostly characters i could use to write other stuff and the utility of reading the hockey rpf is to sort of teach myself how hockey works. i did a similar thing with baseball but not with rpf, that was more aus where characters were on baseball teams. familiarizing myself with the local hockey lore or whatever. but the thing is, i'm finding myself enjoying it for other reasons. in these fics--and, honestly, this is a big part of what i get out of kpop rpf at this point in my life, when i'm reading that--there are two main themes: the mortifying ordeal of fame and being in the closet, and bodies/embodiment. despite the fact that i've never really spent significant time closeted and have never really put myself at great risk being queer--accident of birth, i truly just got lucky--i'm fascinated by stories about the pressure of hiding some part of yourself and what happens for you to finally risk it all--or what happens when that narrative gets taken out of your control!! it's about the repression i think. and then, in terms of both being a pro sports player and being an idol, there's also the question of what happens when you get old? what happens when you get hurt? there's this one hockey pairing that kind of doesn't exist anymore that i've been reading a lot about because i guess one of those guys is quote-unquote injury prone and so there's this whole thing there. idk. i don't know how to explain it but it's good. and i like stories where one or both of them is having a really truly bad time but one of them makes a point to prove to the other: no, i love you, and no matter what's going on with you mentally or physically i am here to take care of you.

and i'm sad right now because i'm having a moment about literally everyone else around me getting married and in some cases having kids and i'm by myself and i feel fundamentally unlovable or whatever and i want someone to say that they'll love me no matter what so fucking bad so i guess that's the appeal of nolan patrick/travis konecny to me, or whatever. sorry to doompost, reader(s).  i'd say i won't talk like this again but i'd be lyinggggg

Probably more than ten years ago now, I was at the library and picked up The Raven Boys from the Teen section. I fell wildly in love with it and by the time Blue Lily, Lily Blue came out I asked my parents to buy me a copy for Christmas. They did, and got it signed. Since then, every time Maggie Stiefvater has had a new book released, my parents KNOW that they will be getting me a copy. 

The Listeners came out earlier this month. 

I'm in Dallas visiting my grandparents (staying for a few days before heading off to Denver for BHS International tomorrow (!)) and... while I have a good relationship with my grandparents, and they're relatively young compared to the grandparents of most other people my age, there isn't exactly a lot of "leaving the house" that they do, so spending time with them is a lot of "we sit on the couch and read quietly". Hence I finished this book in two and a half days. Spoilers from this point onward.

It's about a magical hotel with water that can hurt, or heal. During the onset of WWII, the hotel is asked by the FBI to house Axis diplomats who are being detained. The hotel's general manager, a WV holler girl who ingratiated herself with the hotel's wealthy owning family, tries to balance her dedication to the hotel's reputation for service and luxury against a growing moral objection. Meanwhile, the lead FBI agent, a coal miner's son, struggles with whether to remain in his job (and he also knows about the magic water and is scared of it because he thinks it'll fuck him up), and the autistic daughter of one of the detained German attaches watches the hotel guests and learns to get a sense of the water. It's a classic Maggie novel in many ways. It's Appalachian, it's about class difference, it has this subtle folk magic that's normal but also isn't, it has the same kind of rhythm and form. It's also her first real adult novel, which... should have felt more jarring to me, I think. It's like I've grown up with her protagonists, a bit. I'm a good eleven years younger than June Porter Hudson but nevertheless I started reading her YA books as a teen and now that I am, for the first time, feeling like a Real Adult, she comes out with an adult novel. You know?

I wish June and Tucker hadn't gotten together, but other than that I really think the plot WORKED. I was questioning the inclusion of Hannelore for a bit (is she trying to be PC? not sure if she's succeeding. that kind of thought, you know) and June's subsequent reveal that she, too, was like that as a kid and functionally "grew out of it". But it was actually necessary to move the plot along. June needed the moral conflict of "this girl, who is Like Me, is going to be sent to her death if I don't Act". Fundamentally this book is about the cost of keeping up appearances, and how sometimes we need to do things to protect not only ourselves but the community around us. I think that's timely, now. At this point in my life, where I have an office job and I'm starting to think hard about my future and just when the world is falling apart more than usual, I struggle sometimes with doing the "right thing" versus doing the thing that will rock the boat the least. June learns that she needs to rock the boat a little more, as do I.