Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 04:52 pm

On the walls of the sanctuary are inscribed the names of the Living Dead, which were taken from them at the time of their enslavement. These names were thankfully recorded by the priests who removed the names, so we still possess records of the thousands of men and women who were enslaved in this palace and usually died here shortly thereafter.

Not all of the names of the Living Dead are inscribed here. At the time of the rededication of this sanctuary, the Jackal met with the former Living Dead and their families to determine whether their names should be inscribed here, along with the names of the Living Dead from earlier generations. So strong a stigma continues in Koretia against being enslaved that the present generation of the former Living Dead - or their family members, where the former slaves could not speak for themselves - asked that their names not be inscribed here until after their bodies were dead. Their wishes were respected.

[Translator's note: The intersection between family and slavery can be seen in Light and Love.]

Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 03:40 pm


A zeppelin-full of digital graphic albums featuring Studio Foglio's Girl Genius, the "gaslamp fantasy" webcomic of adventure, romance, and mad science.

Bundle of Holding: Girl Genius (from 2020)



Even more Girl Genius, plus Buck Godot, Zap Gun for Hire.

Bundle of Holding: Girl Genius 2 (from 2023)
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 03:49 pm
I'm 2 episodes into s2 and I think I'm going to have to stop. She's not funny, she's not punching up, she's just selfish and mean. I think this might be the showrunners having no theory of how the Addamses fit into a larger supernatural universe. Sigh. On to Alien: Earth!

Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland: In South Dakota, people largely welcomed missiles but landowners often didn’t like giving up their land for them (NIMBYism for weapons of mass destruction). Heefner also tracks the persistence of antinuclear protest once it got started, and she makes the point that one reason the lack of success didn’t stop the hardcore protestors was religious faith—protest was an act of sacrifice and witness even if it didn’t have worldly effects.

Nathan Bomey, Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back: Newsy-ish account of Detroit’s bankruptcy. Bomey really doesn’t like unions; he’s more neutral about the interests of lender-creditors.

Grant Faulkner, The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story: Paean to the affordances of flash fiction, including drabbles and six-word stories, with exercises. Interesting read.

Tiya Miles, Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Bondage and Freedom in the City of the Straits: Another attempt to reconstruct a history of people who were mostly spoken about in the records we have. I didn’t think the speculation about what they felt and thought was very helpful, but it was a useful reminder that there was an active slave trade in Indians in the area for a long time, as well as African/African-American slavery. Michigan was supposedly free territory after the Northwest Ordinance, but that didn’t mean that slavery disappeared (despite opportunities that many took to cross borders to change status).

Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015: The premise here is that the disaster didn’t start in 2005. Most of the book is pre-hurricane explanations of why the city was so vulnerable. Greed and racism play their roles.

Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution: Schama focuses on loyalist African-Americans who were forced out to Canada and then to Sierra Leone. While most whites were indifferent to their fate and willing to violate the promises that the Crown had made during the Revolutionary War, a few took their duties seriously, which is how the transitions were made. The first elected black government, and the first women voting for that government, was in Sierra Leone (though a subsequent white guy sent to replace the good one removed women’s ability to vote). It’s beautifully written as well as interesting.
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 03:40 pm
What I Just Finished Reading: Since last Wednesday I have read/finished reading: Lord of the Silent (An Amelia Peabody Mystery) by Elizabeth Peters, The Sound of Broken Glass (A Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James Mystery) by Deborah Crombie, Kidnapped in the Kitchen (The Inn at Holiday Bay) by Kathi Daley and Through the Evil Days (Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries) by Julia Spencer-Fleming.


What I am Currently Reading: I just finished a book last night so haven’t started another one, but I’m hoping it’ll be the book I requested on a whim, The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt by Kara Cooney. (Yes, I requested it while reading the last Amelia Peabody book.)


What I Plan to Read Next: Uncertain. I do have another library book out, but I might actually read one of my own books first.




Book 85 of 2025: Lord of the Silent (An Amelia Peabody Mystery) (Elizabeth Peters)

This book is so good!! spoilers )

I enjoyed this very much and am giving it five hearts.

♥♥♥♥♥



Book 86 of 2025: The Sound of Broken Glass (A Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James Mystery) (Deborah Crombie)

This book was so good! spoilers )

I enjoyed this very much and am giving it five hearts.

♥♥♥♥♥



Book 87 of 2025: Kidnapped in the Kitchen (The Inn at Holiday Bay) (Kathi Daley)

This book was okay. spoilers )

I'm starting to get tired of this series, but I also have the need to know what happens, so I'll most likely continue with it. Unless I forget about it when the two new books come out in the fall (there is one left to read that is already out). I'm giving this one three hearts.

♥♥♥



Book 88 of 2025: Through the Evil Days (Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries) (Julia Spencer-Fleming)

This book was (mostly) good. spoilers )

I enjoyed this book right up until the author cut out my heart at the end; I’m deducting a heart because it still stings.

♥♥♥♥
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 02:21 pm
Today is mostly sunny, humid, and hot.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.











.
 
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 03:07 pm

I was also looking to add quinoa to my rejuv' but couldn't find it. Eventually I found it last night while looking for a spice mix to add to my late night snack... Anyway this culture is doing well so far. I've since remixed the contents and transferred it to a new container.

— frandroid - Mahmoud Khalil is free!! (@frandroid.bsky.social) August 13, 2025 at 12:32 PM
Saturday, August 9th, 2025 05:14 am

Book Info

Topics: Nonfiction, Feminism, Environmental Activism, Climate Change

LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/work/book/291465827

Acquired from: Little Free Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA [see visit log]

Started reading: August 9, 2025

Finished reading: August 13, 2025 (DNF’d)

Reading Updates

Page 0: Picked this book to read next because it’s the heaviest— I don’t want to have to worry about trying to pack it and take it with me!

It’s a relatively new book (published 2023) and is basically a collection of interviews with climate activists.

Came with a bookmark from the Ann Arbor District Library (Seed Sampler, which promotes their seed library!). It’s a really nice bookmark and I’m probably gonna keep it for my collection.

Read the rest of this entry » )

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 11:48 am

Went on a re-visiting circuit of Little Free Libraries from the first log, and found a new library! Plus some more good books.

Was a really nice walk, too, though I was sweating by the end because it was like 80F by 8am yeesh.

On another day, I went into the main downtown part of Ann Arbor and visited two LFLs that’re near the Farmer’s Market, though I didn’t find any books to take with me.

New LFL visited:

  1. LFL #167052 – Jones Community Garden Library – Ann Arbor, MI
  2. LFL #189363 – Ann Arbor, MI (not listed on the map somehow)
  3. LFL #198908 – Detroit Street Filling Station – Ann Arbor, MI

Dropped off Moby-Duck, Seasons of the Wild and Climate Resilience!

Obtained Into the Wild, Granta issue 138, The Forest Unseen, Sweet Days of Discipline

Photos under here! )

🌟 All LFL Visited / All LFL Visit Logs

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 01:13 pm
This poem came out of the August 5, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by [personal profile] janetmiles. It also fills the "As If By Magic" square in my 8-1-25 card for the Crime Classics Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the series Monster House. It falls between "Secondhand Sight" and "Paper, Scissors, Stone" so reading in that order will make more sense.

Read more... )
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 01:11 pm
Life is full of things which are hard or tedious or otherwise unpleasant that need doing anyhow. They help make the world go 'round, they improve skills, and they boost your sense of self-respect. But doing them still kinda sucks. It's all the more difficult to do those things when nobody appreciates it. Happily, blogging allows us to share our accomplishments and pat each other on the back.

What are some of the hard things you've done recently? What are some hard things you haven't gotten to yet, but need to do? Is there anything your online friends could do to make your hard things a little easier?

Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 10:36 am


This is one of the most unusual books I've ever read. And if you've been reading my reviews for a while, you know what a strong statement that is. Here's the buries-the-lede back cover:

The town's teenagers are dying. One by one they are mysteriously disappearing but Meggie Alexander refuses to wait in fear. She and her boyfriend Matthew decide to get to the bottom of all the strange goings-on. And they discover a horrible secret.

Now someone is stalking them - but who? There's only one thing that can save Meggie now - the stories a tarantula told her as a baby.


Bet you weren't expecting that, huh?

This was a Scholastic novel from 1988. I'd seen other Thomas novels in that period but never read them, because they all looked like depressing historicals about the black experience - the one I recall seeing specifically was Touched by Fire. I sure never saw this one. I found it in the used children's section of The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.

Any description of this book won't truly convey the experience of reading it, but I'll give it a shot. It starts with a prologue in omniscient POV, largely from the POV of a talking tarantula visiting Meggie soon after she's born, chatting and spinning webs that tell stories to her:

"I get so sick and tired of common folk trying to put their nobody feet on my queenly head. Me? I was present in the first world. Furthermore," the spider boasted, squinting her crooked eyes, "I come from a looooong line of royalty and famous people. Millions of years ago I saw the first rainbow. I ruled as the Egyptian historical arachnid. I'm somebody."

As I transcribe that, it occurs to me that she shares some DNA with The Last Unicorn's butterfly.

The prologue ends when Meggie's mother spots the spider and tries to kill her, believing her daughter is in danger. Chapter one opens when Meggie is fifteen. Briefly, it feels like a YA novel about being black and young in (then)-modern America, and it kind of is that, except for the very heightened writing style, including the dialogue. Thomas is a poet and not trying to write in a naturalistic manner. It's often gorgeous:

She ended [the sermon] with these resounding words falling quiet as small sprinklings of nutmeg whispering into a bowl of whipping cream.

The milieu Meggie lives in is lived-in and sharply and beautifully drawn, skipping from a barbershop where customers complain about women preaching to a quick sketch of a neighborhood woman trying to make her poor house beautiful and not noticing that its real beauty lies in her children to Meggie's exquisitely evoked joy in running. And then Meggie finds the HEADLESS CORPSE of one of her classmates! We check in on a trio of terrible neighbors plotting to do something evil to the town's teenagers! The local spiders are concerned!

This book has the prose one would expect to find in a novel written by a poet about being a black teenager in America, except it's also about headless corpses and spider guardians. It is a trip and a half.

Read more... )

I am so glad that Thomas wrote this amazingly weird novel, and that someone at the bookshop bought it, and that I just happened to come in while it was on the shelf. It's like Adrian Tchaikovsky collaborated with Angela Johnson and Lois Duncan. There has never been anything like it, and there never will be again. Someone ought to reprint it.
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 05:51 pm
- Reading: 81 books to 13 Aug 2025.

DNFs: 5/86. I've had a higher percentage of dnfs than usual this year. Can't decide if my sense of personal mortality and the easy availability of other reading material is causing me to be pickier or whether I'm finally inside a demographic targeted for enough marketing guff to negatively effect my choices. Woe is me - the algorithms fail again &c. An especially surprising dnf was a book about trains and train travel that the author had mysteriously managed to make dull!

Current reading: 81. Perspectives by Laurent Binet, a library reservation with a waiting list, which was recommended by a discerning friend and is a good read so far (approximately 30% in).

Finished reading: 80. The Rings of Saturn, by WG Sebald, (translated by Michael Hulse), 1995 (1999), a patchwork of fictionalised (?) autobiographical essays and historical fact-tion and I-refuse-to-call-this-a-novel, 3/5. As I previously mentioned, I read this meditation on death and destruction while in similar settings to the framing story of a walk along the East Anglian coastline, and with the addition of extreme and bizarre weather this occasionally became a near-hallucinatory experience. I didn't find it engaging, however, nor as depressing as reading too much poetry by Thomas Hardy. Although I admit I over-identify with the habit of living like a refugee in your own life, as I'm sure many people exiled traumatically from their roots would. This is a better review of Rings of Saturn than I could ever write, lol (and, yes, three stars):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/221843487

- Holiday history, enslavement: there was a debate about whether I'd visit Castell Penrhyn while I was in the area (I'm a NT member so get in free). I'll note here that I have a permanent bee in my bonnet about the way enslavers such as the Pennants are described and especially the following normative wording (not this author, whose book I enjoyed, but the whole normative framing):

"the Pennants [family], received ÂŁ14,683 17s. 2d. (around 1.3 million today) for the freeing of 764 enslaved people in Jamaica"*

Because what actually happened was that the British people collectively through the British state bought people enslaved legally under British law, and the British people chose to free those enslaved people after changing British law to make owning people as chattel slaves illegal (although that didn't end other forms of "slave" labour, as the continued use of "indentured labour" and the need for a Modern Slavery Act in 2015 demonstrates). Owners of enslaved people in the British Empire could have legally "freed" those people any time but they didn't want to do so. The act of the British state buying and freeing enslaved people is framed as "compensation" for the owners "freeing" slaves, but the owners were forced by law to allow their slaves to nominally go free, and I for one refuse to accept any framing that credits the enslavers and not the people who made them stop (and British taxpayers continued paying for that from 1833 until 2015). This belated, and expensive, partial justice isn't worthy of any praise or pride but we should at least be honest about who did what, and what exactly they did. Reminder: the abolition of chattel slavery only became a popular cause after successful revolts by enslaved people, and the British "sugar strike" that hit enslavers' profits (the boycott was mostly participated in by working and middle class British women), and William Wilberforce et alia wanted to slow down the freeing of enslaved people.

* Note: the ex-slaves received no compensation, obv.
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 09:12 am
The Starlink setup has arrived (that was fast) and not a moment too soon.  Last night I could not watch anything on streaming.  About every 30 seconds or so my service would stall.  I've called the roofer for help getting a roof jack mounted, so hopefully Starlink will be functional soon. 
Why yes, I am making several changes that will materially improve quality of life.  Stove, water pump, internet...  
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 11:42 pm
This is your weekly read-in-progress post for you to talk about what you're currently reading and reactions and feelings (if any)!

For spoilers:

<details><summary>insert summary</summary>Your spoilers goes here</details>

<b>Highlight for spoilers!*</b><span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 10:02 am
This novel is structured as a woman's reminiscences of her life, beginning in the 1990s at an elite boarding school she attended in England. The students are told that they are special and important, and that it is an extreme privilege to attend this school, but they aren't given a clear understanding of why this is or what makes the school so different from others. Throughout the first few chapters, it becomes increasingly apparent that something strange and ominous is going on. The students have close friendships with each other, but nobody ever mentions family or going home for holidays. The teachers are cagey about the nature of the situation, and some seem distressed by it, as if their hands are tied.

What is really going on is stated outright a quarter of the way into the book. The rest of the book is spent exploring that premise and looking at how the characters are shaped by and respond to their circumstances. I don't know whether the author intended to present the premise as a secret or not, but the book has been marketed as though it's a secret, and whether it's a spoiler is subjective. (Thank you all for your input on the poll!)

The premise and my thoughts on treating it as a spoilerThe premise is that the students are clones who are being raised to serve as organ donors. They have limited rights compared to non-clones, and the expectation is that they will die from having their organs harvested sometime in young adulthood.

I knew the premise going in because I saw it discussed years ago, and I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to figure it out even before it's made explicit. But I'm sure it also depends on what your expectations are going into the book, if you're looking for a "twist" and how broad you think the scope of possible twists is. Personally, I think it does the book a disservice to coyly market it as literary fiction, if that's the reason the premise has been treated as a secret. For people who like both litfic and specfic equally maybe it's fine, but that's not everyone, so you're asking for people who only want litfic to be annoyed by the bait-and-switch, and for some proportion of people who would like the book to never pick it up because they think it's not for them (or to be aggravated by the implication that we're not calling it specfic because it's "serious literature" instead). I knew it was speculative fiction and I enjoyed it as speculative fiction, and I think dancing around the genre is unnecessary. So that's where I sit with it.

My thoughts which assume you know the premise but don't necessarily assume you've read the bookAnyway! I really liked the book! Based on the three Ishiguro books I have now read, (this, Klara and the Sun, and The Remains of the Day, I've come to appreciate his skill in writing characters who have a perspective on the world that could be considered "limited" in that the reader and the other characters understand things the POV characters don't, but it's very clear that their lived experience has validity and their inner emotional landscape is as rich as anyone's. No matter how small a person's world may look from the outside, to them it is everything.

Kathy and the other clones see things from a certain angle because of the way they've been raised and what they've been taught to believe. They don't automatically perceive the horror of their existence the way we do because they aren't us, they don't know what we know about how things ought to be. But within their own frame of reference, they live their lives and make choices according to their own understanding of who has authority and what the inevitable facts of life are. Their experiences, memories, feelings, insights, and relationships matter even if we can see how constrained they are by their circumstances. After all, we are also bounded by what we perceive as inevitable facts of life, and we also don't know whether we perceive that correctly.

I think the book reflects how we are socialized not to talk about (let alone question) uncomfortable societal truths. I was struck by Kathy's observation that as the students were growing up, the teachers drip-fed them bits of information that they were not quite old enough to understand. She realizes this may not even have been consciously planned, but it had the effect of making them feel they had "always known" what they were and the life that had been chosen for them, even though they had no specific memories of being told. I think this is a bullseye description of what it feels like to be socialized to accept injustice.

Children don't just learn from what is directly stated to them, they learn from what isn't said, from adults' discomfited grimaces, annoyed dismissals, vague contextless remarks, and awkward changes of subject. The school setting (which was a choice on the part of the characters, to structure the clones' residence as a school—it's not like these kids know what schools are really like in the outside world) to me drives this point home. The adults are trying to educate the students for reasons of their own that we learn later, but the primary lesson they're teaching isn't on the curriculum.

Some specific thoughts that reveal details from much later in the bookOnce we got the full explanation of what the school really was, that they were trying to "prove" the clones had souls, I found it just as disturbing as the concept of organ donor clones in itself. Miss Emily's goal wasn't to prove the clones' humanity so they could be liberated and the hideous practice of organ harvest put to an end, it was to prove their humanity so they could be treated a little bit better before the slaughter.

The fact that she is able to tolerate this cognitive dissonance speaks volumes about what she has been indoctrinated to accept, and points to the modes of thought underpinning the broader dystopian world. This, for me, was the true horrifying reveal, and it's all the more horrifying because it is entirely mundane: The belief that a class of people is subhuman can withstand knowledge that disproves the belief, provided that abandoning the belief is inconvenient enough.

By the same token, Miss Emily's description of how public opinion turned against her ideas and led to the closure of Hailsham is so deeply unsettling because it is so familiar and plausible. A push for expanded rights for a marginalized group, even an incremental push, is a precarious thing that can be derailed by a poorly-timed scandal or a negative association, even if the connection is tenuous. As in our own world, clearly many people's beliefs are not based on reason, on consistent principles, or even on a blunt assessment that saving some people justifies sacrificing others. They're based on how much of the truth you can convince yourself to dismiss. If you're looking for a reason to discredit calls for justice, you'll always find one, and you'll find plenty of people happy to validate your conclusion.

Emily's story doesn't spell this out. As always, it's between the lines as she skips over assumed context that Kathy and Tommy don't share. And they're not even looking for justice, only a temporary reprieve from the fate they've already accepted. But they can't get that, not even when they ask nicely. (Does it ever work to ask nicely?)

My biggest takeaway from the book is how difficult it is to independently invent the idea of a just world when that concept has been denied to you, and when even the people who come the closest to being your allies don't actually want justice—they want injustice with the sharpest of its vulgar edges politely sanded off.