intertext

His stretched-out left paw is fair warning that Purrcy's fluffy fluffy belly is indeed a trap, reach for it at your peril. But look at that innocent face!

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Sometimes you have to prove love by squooshing someone's head, sometimes you have to do it by making someone squoosh your head. It's the 🎶Circle of Squoooosh🎶

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My only resolution for 2026: I'm going to keep a list of books I read (only the ones I finish count). Re-reads count. I won't take time to rate, because then I'll slow down & give up on the list (per previous experience). My list on Bluesky starts here

#1. The Heist of Hollow London by Eddie Robson. Post-this-apoc heist, notable for most important relationship being between m & f BFFs. How often does *that* happen?!?

#2. Nine Goblins: A Tale of Low Fantasy and High Mischief, T. Kingfisher. Re-read of the version I have, which I assume is the same as the one coming out this year (??). An early T. Kingfisher, but sets up many of her familiar tropes: more than usually lively skeletons! bodies are full of fluids! never trust a unicorn! war is hell! Someone's got to make food, do laundry, plant things, pay attention to the livestock/children, that's the really *important* work. Never trust an officer. You know the drill.

#3. Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie. Re^nth read, because last week I binged all the *other* Imperial Radch books. This time I made a point of paying attention to clues, and I think Anaander Mianaai is male-bodied, which isn't what I expected -- in the back of my mind, I though the translation convention reflected something about AM, which was then generalized to the rest of the Radch. But apparently not!

Having re-read them all so recently, I conclude this one isn't one of my favorites of the Imperial Radch books, because so much of it is about Seivarden -- who I can't help seeing as looking more or less like Spike with darker hair & skin, a classic fandom woobie wet cat who thinks he's better than you but is still a wet cat. When basically he's an *incredible* snob, and I hate people like & they can't stand me, either.

#4. Guns of the Dawn, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky mentioned it on bluesky as a book he's especially proud of, I saw it got good reviews from people I respect, so I bit.

I couldn't completely suspend my disbelief because two things about the war kept making me go whut? whut?

First & most important: if your total war is pre-industrial, you don't mass conscript women for the front lines because you MUST keep them on the farms, size of your home-grow army is limited by number of people needed to raise food, which is at least half the population. If *all* the men are in army or dead the war is already lost, because the country is starving.

If your total war is industrial (WWI+ IRL), you mass conscript or re-purpose women for industry as well as farming, because each front-line soldier has to be supported by so much materiel & logistics.

Upon reflection, this is probably just a symptom of a general problem with books about the past: modern people have *no idea* how large a percentage of pre-modern populations worked in food production. *No idea*. Also in textile production!

The other thing that bugged me started when we learned more about how the war started. (ROT-13 spoilers begin) Gur Xvat bs Ynfpnaar unq gur ehyvat ahpyrne snzvyl bs Qraynaq xvyyrq naq gubhtug ur'q gnxr bire ... jvgubhg svefg yvavat hc fhccbegref sebz gur nevfgbpenpl bs Qraynaq? Ab-bar qbrf gung!

Naq vg vfa'g cbffvoyr sbe gurer gb or n Xvat bs Qraynaq jvgubhg n Qraynaq nevfgbpenpl/byvtnepul, jub qb lbh guvax vf *va* Cneyvnzrag? (let me know if there's a better way to do spoilers).

So I feel kind of like there are aspects of the world-building where I put my foot through the canvas scenery and had to hop around for a bit like that. But I can certainly see what people like about this, and elements that will later grow into more fully mature works: the Carboniferous Levant swamps, for instance, and the very Pratchettian soldiers. But for me it suffers from the feeling that it's a game setup more than a *world*.