Tag: reading

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Reading: In Progress

Books I’m reading now:

  • The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin (audiobook): a futuristic tale of how cities become their own life forms, but must be defended against ancient eldritch creatures who prey upon young cities. Humans act as the City champions. There is a sequel, which I already have on paper.
  • Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil: non-fiction about how algorithms are both poorly designed, intentionally opaque, and then misused to deny people good things, like jobs and healthcare.

I have some promising sci-fi recommendations, but some of those are also a series, and I’m considering waiting until that is complete before I start.

Also: I’m very eagerly waiting for the third book in William Gibson’s Jackpot Trilogy. The line between eager and impatient is written in smearing graphite for me: I’ll be so excited when it is released! (Also: more of The Summer Hikaru Died, which you are getting the blow-by-blow of here because I can’t contain myself.)

I’m also still reading entirely too many manhwa, including new seasons of those I endorsed earlier, plus many that I’ve started (described below) but may not finish. The two most likely to keep my attention are in bold.

  • A Savage Proposal (Webtoon), in which the young princess of a defeated kingdom agrees to marry the infamous warlord who defeated her armies, sacrificing her happiness to prevent the wholesale slaughter of her subjects, only to discover that he is… young, really hot, and more respectful to her than the creepy men of her own kingdom.
  • I Will Become the Villain’s Poison Taster (Tappytoon), an isekai story in which a modern girl winds up in the body of a villain, decides the villains might be her only safe allies if she wants to survive, and begins to suspect that the heroes are up to no-good. (Silly dialogue, naive heroine.)
  • Frost will Always Fall (Tappytoon – age restricted), in which a directionless modern girl with a shamanic family has flashbacks to her past lives, where she is torn between two men, at least one of whom she has hot sex with in both the past and present. One of the men has killed her (past) and/or will kill her again (future), though she isn’t sure which.
  • The Villainess Empress’ Attendant (Tappytoon), in which a knight runs away from her kingdom and royal boss, and winds up a servant to the empress of her adoptive homeland – and swears to use her powers to protect the lovely-but-gaslit empress against some unexpectedly close and evil foes with terrifying powers. (The crown prince is pretty. This always helps.) This is wholesome.
  • The Young Emperor Is Obsessed With Me (Tappytoon), in which a mage who prevented the destruction of the world by sealing an interdimensional gate used by evil invaders is adored by a sociopathic boy, who grows up to be a sociopathic emperor; he burns down her house & enchanted forest to force her to live with him (oh-oh); she may be the key to defeating a returning threat to the world, if she can overcome the traumas of all she lost.
  • To My Husband’s Mistress (Tappytoon), in which an innocent young woman falls for a love scammer who kills her father and then has his girlfriend kill her; she takes on a new identity for a multi-year plan to bring her killers and their accomplices to ruin while drinking too heavily, loathing herself, and being bankrolled by a frequently shirtless prince with his own revenge plans.
  • You Can’t Kill Me: The Secret Bride of the Black Wolf (Webtoon), a woman abused by a powerful husband in the afterlife dies (?) there horribly, but relives her earth death and has a new chance at her underworld afterlife (?) by marrying a different, random underworld nobleman; her new husband is patient about her PTSD, but doesn’t know her true situation, nor that he is interacting with her past-afterlife-abuser.

The overarching theme is: women in unusually bad situations having a do-over in some form. Let’s not wonder why I am drawn to these stories, or if we must, emphasize that most of them will likely have a happy-ish ending.

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Life: Sleep and its absence

The flash flood warnings have ended! That’s a treat. I’m dry and on land, and grateful for that. The weather has been highly variable all weekend, and has induced panic over opportunities to take advantage of the harsh, high contrast sunlight I enjoy (I have SO MUCH FILM waiting!), only to to be promptly foiled by low-ish temperatures and the arrival of diffuse clouds.

I’ve taken a brief break from posting while trying to get my sleep schedule back in order. That… hasn’t gone well.

I’ve been delirious after a days of averaging just five hours of sleep, and my punchiness (using the least common definition of that word) isn’t especially entertaining. I’ve increased my exercise and decreased my caffeine, so at least I am warmer and more fit during my delirium.

I’ve been reading, yet my preferred manhwa are either just getting started, not at a sensible reviewing point, or just returning from hiatus. The few ‘mid’ ones aren’t worth your time to read (or my time to write about). I’ve got a couple books going, and am determined to finish them completely before I write about them. I have two new reading friends (!) who love sci-fi (!!), and so may drop everything to start some of their recommendations. I’m selling them hard on Martha Well’s Murderbot Diaries (marthawells.com) and the gargantuan Anathem by Neal Stephenson (nealstephenson.com). They didn’t flee despite the gleam in my eyes, so I am encouraged. (Watching me struggle to maintain my composure while gushing about William Gibson’s most recent work is surely challenging...)

I’ve also found a new way to remain informed of serious journalism, politics, truly bad jokes, good owl photos, and types of fungus I didn’t know existed. Somehow, these are all available in one place. Yes, I joined Bluesky Social. I… will regret this, but not right away: all of my favorite people left the bird site and are using bsky’s tools to reconnect me to the same networks of thinkers, plus a new pool of silliness. (My sudoku scores are about to plummet…)

AEG in SF (or at least somewhere near SF most of the time) (@aeginsf.bsky.social)
Possibly too dedicated to drinking coffee to remember to post. Writer, photographer, reader, printmaker, blogger, foodie, insomniac, professional teeth-gnasher.

Don’t be alarmed by my relative inactivity here. I’m hoping to make up for this over the holidays, when I have a near-infinite list of projects saved up to do…

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Reading: What I’m Reading Now

  • N.K. Jemison has a collection of short stories, and while many of them are from earlier in her career, they don’t feel like early, learning-the-craft stories – they are absolutely superb. The collection also opens with an essay about what it is like to write science fiction stories with people who are like us ethnically, and how great it feels to envision futures that include us!
  • I Tamed My Ex-Husband’s Mad Dog (graphical fiction) is in chapter 89, and either everyone is going to die, or the main characters will live happily together, or maybe they’ll be happy for a VERY BRIEF TIME before they all die? IT IS SO TENSE! I could barely make it through chapters 87-88, which involved a lot of blood – blood that had belonged to one of the main characters, so they couldn’t make the joke I like so much about it being someone else’s.
  • The Broken Ring: This Marriage Will Fail Anyway (graphical fiction) is at chapter 82, and there is some tension building as the main characters are apart, as one of them figures out who the assassination target was during their vacation, and tries to get information on… something that they shouldn’t be able to remember.
  • Men of the Harem (graphical fiction) has resumed at full speed, and it isn’t completely clear that Empress Latil is the vampire lord that two of her most handsome fans hope she will be. It also isn’t clear why she can punch vampires and send them flying across a room. Also, magic tools allow some characters to wear the faces of other people, a complication I didn’t need!
  • The Remarried Empress (graphical fiction) has also come out of hiatus, and I’m still pleased by how much the art style tightened up over the course of its 187 chapters (so far). While the empress’ remarriage was supposed to be primarily political, her new spouse is so much more fun than her old one! And, because paternity testing science exists, there is a lot of drama in her former palace…
  • US Political and World News. There is SO MUCH OF IT right now. And it is a roller coaster.
  • Letters. Which my hands have hurt too much to respond to prettily. (I think I understand why there were so many searches combining COVID and arthritis….)
  • My Japanese lessons. Oh, the torment of half-remembering a language!

I hope your own reading provides you as much pleasure as mine gives me.

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Life: Early August

Two almond milk lattes at Ritual Coffee.
Delicious to look at, delicious to drink: hooray for almond milk lattes at Ritual Coffee!

Update on Facial Graffiti: After using a harsh fading shampoo three times in one day on my hennaed eyebrows, I went to work and… received compliments on my new glasses from a nice young man.

I didn’t have new glasses: my newly visible eyebrows frame my face so well, my glasses look better. All is well that ends with improvements to my vanity, I guess!

I just have to figure out how to avoid that first-day-Sharpie-attack look. And argue with my stylist about her very unrealistic definition of “light brown.”

Update on What I’m Reading: I was going to apologize for going from being the person who only writes about SERIOUS SUBJECTS (oooooh, so impressive) and summarizes US Supreme Court rulings with mildly catty commentary to someone who has 85% graphical fiction content with a trend toward gay male romances, but… why apologize? I’m enjoying myself! That’s what is important. Well, to me, anyway. There are always more heavy books in my pile, and I will get to them when the time is right.

What I’m (Not) Writing: I’m working on notes for the science fiction scenes that I imagine when I’m listening to too much of Massive Attack’s Angel, but I’m not getting far. Someone sits near me, and when he is there, I don’t write. I just… am. I hold the pen; I hold the notebook; words just float away.

The one who sits near me has the best hair. (Ahhhhh.)

Others sit near me and don’t have this effect, so I am not forever sabotaged: it’s just that the scenes that have come to me aren’t all smoothly connected (there is a war, war lacks narrative cohesion and involves abrupt transitions in my view), and it will take some time to connect them with proper bonds.

I’m afraid I’m being influenced by the styles of streaming television, as the wreckage in the first scene makes me want to put up a giant title card that says, “10 days earlier” and launch a flashback… I don’t need to write that way. Unless Netflix has a pile of money for me, in which case, I will happily change my style.

Also: I need to not kill off so many characters so early. Aside from the realism that would bring. (Have you noticed how most named characters survive nearly every improbable thing in American stories? What the hell?!?).

I designed a costume for the character modeled on myself years ago. The left arm of her spacesuit is a different color (red) from the rest of her suit, which is unfortunate, but is based on something she predicts before it happens. Her/My left arm has it EVEN WORSE in this story than it has in real life. Dear left arm in real life, I truly love you, even with the plate and screws (especially with the plate, screws, and the scar!), and I am so sorry for what happens to you in the novella.

COVID Negativity Is The Best Negativity: Stay positive in outlook, negative in fresh diagnostic tests!

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Life / Reading Notes of the moment

  • The comics I await most eagerly are:
  • While weekly serialization feels brutal on the artists’ side for being too fast for them to produce the work, this pace remains slow for readers. It is jarring to open a chapter in a middle of a conversation when I can’t remember who was even involved… I’m definitely going to have to re-read many of these to write about them once they are complete. Or delay reading them until I can do so in larger sets of chapters.
  • Most of my comics are about women, and that’s because I’m picking those out of the adventure, drama, and romance sections because action heroines are fun (I’ve had decades of male-centered stories!) and prefer their art.
    • There is more gender balance in the women-led stories – so many male characters all around in various roles (not just as romantic leads, but also as allies, fans, supported, fathers, villains…) where the reverse isn’t always true for the man-led ones.
    • There are more elaborate artsy details in most of the stories I choose. I skim lots of types of comics, and reject many of the heroine stories if the art doesn’t call me (or if they are beautifully drawn but ramble about strategic agriculture!), but I have this problem more frequently with the action hero stories. Those are generally illustrated much more simply, and I’m less interested in those art styles.
  • The ‘boys love’ comics I’ve chosen combine drama and adventure successfully with romance elements. (Love IS love!) As I was telling a friend about them, everyone is remarkably good-looking, plus, there is sex, drama, and adventure – what’s not to love?

Reading current Korean comics has become a proper hobby. And I get excited when I see other people reading comics from the same publisher on the train, but am hold myself back from asking for their recommendations… for now.

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Life: Quiet Reading and Rest

Growing Moth Family
Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.

Slow, deep breath… Ahhh. I am making an effort to have a quiet, peaceful, restful, and restorative weekend, and am partly succeeding. However, internalized pressure to ‘be productive’ and the heaviness of being overworked in my career leave me feeling a bit hollowed out.

I’m being kind to myself: I’ve enjoyed a wonderful bubble bath, slept several consecutive hours, devoted most of a day to reading, ordered in delicious vegan & gluten-free ramen from a local restaurant, played with metallic watercolors, lounged without goals… Yet, I still feel like I’ve taken a beating. Two day weekends just aren’t quite enough.

Reading US News: I’m adjusting to the new political landscape, now that the competition for the White House had a significant upgrade. This has been the topic of excited conversation initiated by colleagues in the nearest kitchen, and we are all feeling a bit better about the future as a result, which is a pleasant change. It makes opening my news apps (The Guardian (UK) and the Washington Post (US)) easier to do without a experiencing a sense of dread.

Reading Books: My pile of non-fiction books is still centered on heavy topics, so the comics I’m reading soften these themes for me through the magic of escapism.

Reading Manga and Manhwa: To be methodical in reviewing graphic novels, I made a spreadsheet of everything I am or was reading. (Yes, this was inevitable, if you know me). I have 73 digital comic series on my apps and subscriptions. Of those that I’m enjoying and want to continue reading, 29 haven’t yet made it into this blog, excluding those that are written about & scheduled but not yet posted. (I’m a posting machine!)

Manhwa subgenre: the contract marriage: Both all-age and mature comics from Korea often have awkwardness around the plot device of contract-based marriages. I’ve given up on several of these – what started as an adventure instead is actually drama over whether or not to kiss someone you’ve been married to for a year, which is neither high stakes nor interesting.

Manhwa Relationship Peculiarities: Ten of the comics I haven’t yet written about are rated “mature,” and range from outright pr0n (an old euphemism), to romances where you see clothing loosened (thrills for the chaste!), to stories in which married couples have their physical relationship (a) implied (they share a room!), (b) illustrated (the floating cartoon word sound effects are hilarious), or (c) discussed (sometimes in a way that results in what sounds like sports injuries, which also amuses me). I’ve learned some things about sexual conventions which are non-standard here.

The more explicit mature stories have strange constraints. For example:

  • even the most outrageously sex-oriented heterosexual stories always result in marriage and children, making the ‘how did you two get together’ questions awkward. (My parents forced me into marriage forcing me to impersonate my twin sister… I got married to avoid marrying someone abusive… My family sold me to settle a debt… But that’s all fine, because now we have kids!)
  • after several bed scenes, there are often flashbacks to the couple having met as children, so even if the circumstances that brought the couple together in adulthood were strange / violent / inappropriate, it’s somehow all okay, because rather than being strangers / captives / conscripts / servants, they previously bonded meaningfully as toddlers or teens. (!?!?!?).
  • in situations where a royal person was abusing a commoner, the commoner is often secretly royalty, which means it wasn’t really an abuse of power. (? What?)

The childhood connection tope makes these relationships even weirder to me – I hope there was no one I befriended as a toddler who feels pressure to fulfill some adult relationship obligation to me now! (‘You babbled at me meaningfully as a toddler, a sure sign that fate is bringing us together, so now we must wed.’ [sound of me calling security])

I’m unsure if I should actually review these, as I may not be going into them with the correct attitude.

Reading about books: It would be too meta for me to summarize this.

Reading Letters and Writing Back: I have terrible tendonitis for unknown reasons (other than ‘I use my arms’), and it hurts to write by hand. This is why I’m not posting any images showing off my recent writing with fountain pens – there isn’t much, and what little there is is scrawl. This prevents me from responding properly to recent handwritten letters I’ve received. I hope to resume writing (and flaunting my shapely personal script and pretty pen collection) soon!

Reading about the current COVID Wave: The new wave is real, and affecting my colleagues, though none have been part of the 400 deaths / week I’ve read about, thankfully. Many colleagues are recovering now, just recovered this week, or are nursing someone who was positive last week. Others tested positive while traveling, complicating their self care (and hard-earned vacations) overseas.

This last topic has me dreading the return of additional vacationing colleagues.

I have plenty of masks in each of my bags and tucked into various jacket pockets (as always), but just had to restock my testing kits…

That next booster cannot. come. soon. enough.

Be well and stay safe out there…

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Life: A Stack of Books

Image of a stack of five books described in further detail in the text
That statistic about ten percent of people buying ninety percent of the books may be about me.

There… was a book sale in a bookshop-turned-different-bookshop (popup, maybe?), and I did not resist. Plus, a special order came in for me at Dog Eared Books, where I shop and take friends visiting from out of town (and where most of my recently reviewed books came from).

I’m currently making very loud, positive sounds while reading Elie Mystal’s Allow Me to Retort. Snyder’s thoughtful and ominous book is too heavy for me this week – I’m too busy being angry about the Supreme Court to cope – but was already growing heavy with ‘bookdarts’ until I switched, as even his introduction brilliantly encapsulates alarmingly relevant ways of viewing our current political crises.

There are more books virtually in this stack: I have a digital stack of purchased audiobooks from libro.fm awaiting my attention also.

Do I have time to read these? No, I don’t even have time to get seven hours of sleep each night, don’t be silly. I will find/make the time, eventually.

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Life: Pajama Weekend

So, it turns out four months is too long to go without a vacation. Who knew?

What? [conversational sounds] Oh. Oh, really? Everyone knew? [conversational sounds] I see. [takes notes, breaks pencil lead from pressing into notebook too hard, tosses notebook across desk.]

I used this weekend to rest. Read, eat, and rest. I am still wearing the very soft clothes I slept in, and I am not ashamed.

I’m reading more [written things] than I write about here. Also, I’m intentionally not writing about much of what I read, because I write to share / endorse / celebrate / promote things I enjoy, and if I’m not that enthused, I don’t want to waste my energy.

I’m not writing about webcomics that spend too much time discussing agriculture. It sounds like a weird bias, but if someone was tortured in a dungeon by their family and uses magic to time travel to avenge themselves, only to spend their days giving expositions about strategic crops, I feel like they are avenging themselves on me, somehow. Another webcomic with a hotly drawn villain somehow led to the lovely heroine making dramatic statements about the berry industry, and I nearly threw my phone. (I’m enjoying one now that involves a secret mission to secure a port, but it is just a side thing, not something I have to pay attention to! The world and characters are well established, and the story doesn’t require this – it’s just a footnote. World-building such details by footnote is FINE!)

I’m not writing about webcomics centered on rivalries between two female-led religious institutions. One of the women is a fraud whose powers are being faked by manipulative men (yes, in more than one comic), and it is getting predictable.

I’m not writing about religious instructional texts I’m dipping into, because those are only interesting if you are in the same sect, and any subjective criticism of such texts is unlikely to be welcome.

I’m not writing about the audiobooks I can’t hear properly in the train or the eBooks on my phone that are in progress.

I’m not writing about current event news, because such news is uniformly awful at the moment, and might encourage you to live under a rock. You might upset a sweet octopus or eel living under that rock, so just leave them and their hidden home alone, deal with humans as much as the rest of us must, and whip a few humans into shape, please.

I do love the magic of scheduling posts in advance, and will try to use this magic more often to spread my infrequent-yet-enthusiastic output more evenly.

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Life: Working too much, reading too little

So, the usual.

I’ve been entertaining myself during times when I can stay awake. I took a ferry ride, and observed that the usual boat was in the shop, so one of the giant commuter boats took its place. I texted a friend about this, with the note, “I like big boats and I cannot lie,” and he found it hilarious. (This is a Sir Mix-a-lot reference, for you young people.)

I am enjoying pleasant cross-employer camaraderie during my commute, and enjoy speaking with my solution-oriented allies at the office.

*

I’m reading multiple new manga which are published serially and are incomplete, so it is difficult to know WHEN to write about them. I may invent a rule about reviewing them at the end of each season, or perhaps 100 chapters? (I’ll need a similar rule if and when I ever write about The Second Sex, which is complete but very, very long. And filled with book flags/darts that I’ve left there for points I want to dwell on.)

I continue to avoid comics which are creepy about female characters’ bodies (groin close-ups on underdressed female characters during battle scenes? No, thank you!), while the men are covered to such an extreme that you can’t see their hands without gloves. That is just weird. If men are that uncomfortable with men showing skin, they should really work on their issues.

The drama and fantasy stories often have women softening/improving violent male characters, even to the point of turning depots and recluses into engaged authority figures who actively attend to the needs of their subjects, and I don’t think that is a very safe theme to promote. The hashtag for those is #charactergrowth, and I find that funny.

I’m still mystified by the many story tangents relating to agriculture. There is a drama, someone is trying to prevent their own execution, and then there are many pages devoted to growing a crop. I… I… What?

There is a running manga in-joke that still surprises me, sometimes 100 or more chapters into a story:
–a main character enters a room covered in blood
–others characters express concern
–the bloody character then says ‘it’s not my blood’ (the actual wording varies), suggesting that they just won a battle of some type that is not being illustrated here.
It is… very funny, in these stories – unexpected, as there hasn’t been a lot of violence until that point, or there was but it was distant. The fact that I find this funny means it is well done, but also that I am living in a culture that has normalized violence. (Oh-oh. True. Yes.)

Please be sure to work on your own #charactergrowth without waiting for a new romantic partner, and avoid being covered in ANYONE’S blood.

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Life: Spring

Violet time
Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.

We are still having rain, somehow, as if the brief rainy season grew accustomed to making national news with its excesses, and is performing an encore.

I am… tired. Late last week, I had the experience of nearly fainting for the first time ever after donating blood. I believe I deserved this for scoffing at others’ need to rest afterward. (Foolish and unwarranted pride is fun to try on, but not fun to wear outside the store – do not purchase it!)

The world is big, but my tired thoughts after work feels small, and I am unaccustomed to this smallness.

*

It’s been about 10 weeks since I relocated, and I still can’t find everything. I am too tired from work to unpack much on weeknights, and some of my furniture where I could put things away remains in storage, so my progress is slow. But it is progress, and I’ll take it!

Construction has resumed, and there is a fresh trench outside. (Yaay?)

I know where I am when I wake up. I’m delighted to be back at home.

*

Despite my long to-read lists of very long books, I remain preoccupied with Korean manga. (It is satisfying in small doses that I can consume before falling asleep!) I remain impressed at how many terrible traumas the heroes and heroines of these stories must overcome. I was summarizing one for my guy friend, telling him about how this young woman had survived her mother’s suicide and family’s abuse, only to escape into feudal poverty, raise her dead best friend’s children as her own, narrowly avoid the children’s trampling deaths, and be indebted to a bloodthirsty nobleman who requires her to become his live-in woman.

The increasingly horrified look on my friend’s face as I described this was superbly dramatic. And THIS IS ONE OF THE MORE CHEERFUL BACKSTORIES! It’s not all bad: she has access to a library, has a loving aunt, and remains impertinent (her spirit is unbroken); the nobleman grows fond of her, is warm, and has abs-for-miles. (That’s ‘abs-for-kilometers’ for those of you outside the U.S.) I’m rooting for her to come into her own in Season 2.

The NOVELTY of all of these Grimm Fairy Tales backstories in illustrated contexts impresses me. Also: perhaps we should send therapists to Korea.

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