on the Zocalo

What I’ve Read

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison – easily my fifth time thru this book. Love how this just unfolds slowly. Maia is such an isolated character but with a deeply firm sense of justice and care for his actual subjects – it’s a bit nonsense as a political system (an emperor from fucking nowhere with no real power base getting the throne and it not turning into a bloody mess? Unlikely!) but as personal journey, it was great. Read it with a book group for the first time and lovely to talk about it with a group.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In – (2024) by John Wiswell – This is a good book! Experimentally gooey and weird first person monster narration, solid set of social and romantic conundrums, solid emotional base, and the story unfolds at a good pace. Overall, a great first novel! At one point, the gooey monster uses the word “allosexual” in their mental narration and I had to put the book down for a minute, but, well, it’s otherwise a pretty good romance and a pretty good adventure. I think I’ll read John Wiswell again. He’s doing interesting things with body horror that is also just… a nonhuman person navigating disability in a convincing way. Some rosemary slander.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym – (1952) I picked this up at the suggestion of a friend whose favorite writer is Max Beerbohm, which I think tells you something about her general reading – usually she’s reading much earlier books than me! This book is one of those English novels of manners that feels like a comedy poised on the knife edge of tragedy – if the author were any less adept at navigating social folly, it could veer into a giant mess, but she keeps dancing on that edge, and I kept laughing! Our main character is Mildred Lathbury, shabby and respectable and a reliable help to her community, observing the world of the more dramatic and more careless married neighbors who somehow keep involving her in their nonsense. Mildred is too sensible and too English to let herself get totally swept up in their drama, but is nevertheless too kind and too accustomed to ‘being useful’ for other people to totally divorce herself from the awkwardness of it all. The end of the novel reads as a bit wistful to me – Mildred seems to be veering towards an existential crisis, wondering if there’s every going to be more to her life than being one of the ‘excellent women’ whose time is at the disposal of every social need but their own happiness. I *think* from context that the end of the novel, where she agrees to help a pushy academic edits his papers, is meant to be a step towards romance and a more fulfilling life, but it’s 1952 and it’s England and Mildred is too smart to not see the trap she’s in and too accustomed to it to balk and run. It’s not quite Austen but it’s not not Austen.


What I’m Reading

Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison – 50% - Audiobook – A Re-read inspired by the Goblin Emperor. This novel follows an investigator introduced in Goblin Emperor in his life after that case. It’s a great example of mystery plots and worldbuilding working in tandem – not every petitioner who comes to Thara Celehar for help asks for help with a mystery that is mysterious to them. Sometimes the case is an opportunity for Addison to show the reader something about the world that is totally everyday for them and wildly strange to us – allowing the story to unfold the world as a mystery itself!

Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams – 1981 book on writing clearly. 20%

Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma – 25% - Audiobook - A habesha-focused YA vampire novel. I’m having a little trouble squaring the idea that vampires formed a pact with humans to limit their predation and the end result was… a university? But the book comes highly recommended and I do like the main character, Kidane Adane (whose name is roughly Amharic for “hero protagonist”). She’s a bit stressful at this point in the narrative, vengeful and grieving by turns.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Vol 2 – Emil Ferris – 30% - I gave up on the hard copy of this book because it’s a behemoth and I simply cannot hold it comfortably.

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky – 5% - I have known robot valet Charles for 5 minutes but if anything bad happens to him, I will fly to England and beat Tchaikovsky’s mailbox with a bat. This is, oddly, a nice companion to Excellent Woman by providing a POV character who is actually completely devoted to taking care of a single man, as a programmed robot, instead of a coerced woman. Charles is having a bit of a crisis.


What I’ll Read Next

The Deep Dark
Track Changes
Alien Clay
Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed
Navigational Entanglements
The Butcher of the Forest
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right
The Brides of High Hill
The Tusks of Extinction
“Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics”
“Signs of Life”
“By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars”
“The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video”
“Loneliness Universe”
“The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion”
“The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea”
“Lake of Souls”