“That was the look of somebody resigned to being the monster they knew they were.”

Gyre lives on Cassandra-5, a planet with immense mineral wealth but little else to commend it. She takes a contract to explore a particular cave system -- dangerous, because the caves are often collapsed by native beasts called Tunnellers -- which will pay enough money for her to get off-world and search for her mother. She's been surgically fitted into a life-support suit, and she expects to find a full team supporting her by comms. Instead, she gets a single person: a woman named Em.

Neither Gyre nor Em has been wholly honest. ( Read more... )

She could weave those falling descants, those trilling calls, those infinitely varied notes into her work. Could she weave sound and silence together, craft a curtain that would keep a tent silent or hold the songs of mourning or merriment within its folds? [loc. 530]

Arzu is the eldest of the three daughters of the Bandit Queen, desert nomads whose world is strongly reminiscent of the Arabian Nights. Her younger sisters, Pali and Sardeet, have each had a novella to themselves (I find that I haven't read Pali's, The Warrior of the Third Veil), so it's Arzu's turn. But she is not as young nor as ambitious as her sisters. She's already happily married to a man of the clan, and her magic is founded on the gentle arts of weaving and threadcraft.

... he will cry out against Frieda if she dances in the wind with her scarf flying above her like a banner. She dances for pure joy, but the war does not recognize that kind of dancing. It knows that she’s twirling her scarf in a prearranged signal to the U-boats lying out offshore, waiting. [p.128]

This was Helen Dunmore's first novel, and some of her tropes and traits are visible: sexual tension within the family, arresting images of the natural world, the inexorable force of gossip and rumour. The setting is Cornwall in 1917, a village near Zennor: D H Lawrence and his German wife Frieda have taken a cottage there, and Lawrence is trying to farm, and to maintain his anti-war stance.

The focal character, though, is Clare Coyne, only daughter of Francis Coyne: she keeps house for her widowed father, paints illustrations for his book on wild flowers, and spends what time she can spare with her friends Hannah and Peggy. As the novel opens, the three girls are eagerly awaiting the return of John William, Hannah's brother and Clare's cousin, who's on leave from the trenches because he's going to be made an officer. ( Read more... )

"...in effect, you must paint what you see, and not what you know to be there. Because what we see and what is there are not always the same thing. I suppose it is important to learn that." [loc. 2026]

My initial mini-review is here: I reread the novel for this full review and can confirm that it is still an utter delight.

Titus Pilcrow is a colourman, a maker and supplier of paints and colours for artists. As the novel opens, he is in despair, because his landlord (also his ex) is evicting him. By a stroke of fortune, ( spoilers below )

“Regardless of how we're born, we get to decide who we are and who we want to be.”

Lorel has always wanted to be a witch. Growing up in her small village, and helping her mother run the stables, is not the life she wants. But there's one problem: she was born in a male body, and there are stories of what the witches do to men who try to infiltrate their ranks.

Luckily her friend Lane, promised to the witches from birth, is determined to be a knight instead ( Read more... )

1. What was the last book you read (or are currently reading)?
   
   Jan Morris’ Trieste and the meaning of nowhere, for what I feel are obvious reasons. It is a very romantic, forgiving view of the city.
   
   
2. What was the last movie you watched?
   
   We caught a bit of the Minions movie dubbed into Italian last night. It was (perhaps unsurprisingly?) easy to follow in another language.
   
   
3. What television series are you currently watching?
   
   Nothing at the moment. We finished a few things before the Easter holiday (new series of Death in Paradise, Small Prophets).
   
   
4. What are some of your favorite blogs or communities online?
   
   I really only read DW and LJ these days. That's enough for me.
   
   
5. What social media do you belong to and check often?
   
   I still have accounts on the usual platforms but I haven't checked any of them since January 2025 when I removed all the apps from my phone. I vaguely miss contact with a few people but it has generally been a good move. I spend more time communicating directly through messaging or email, or more diffusely but in greater depth here on DW & LJ.
   

“You shall be the thing [X] fears above all others, and conquers... Your way shall be very hard, very cruel. I must do terrible things to you, that you may become a monster." [p. 355]

On Labor Day, 1977, in the sleepy American suburb of Garrison Oaks, Carolyn's life changed. She and a dozen other children were orphaned, their homes obliterated, and they were adopted by 'Father'. Father, who seems very powerful, tells the children that they are Pelapi -- an old word that means 'librarian, but also apprentice, or perhaps student' -- and assigns each of them a Catalogue. Carolyn's Catalogue is language: all languages, human and otherwise. ("What if I don't want to?" she asks Father. "It won't matter," he replies. "I'll make you do it anyway.") 

1. Loss-leading to get customers locked in makes good sense, if your lock-in is solid. 
2. If customers get rid of staff under the impression they can replace them with "AI" then they're stuck with the "AI" in the short term.
3. Hiring and training staff is expensive, and modern managers hate admitting they're wrong.
4. It's much easier to carry on doing a poor job and being fashionable.
5. So the "AI" vendors are letting their customers impale themselves firmly on the hook before starting to wind up the pricing.
6. That means that most of the datacentres that were announced but don't seem to be being built are part of the hype. When prices rise, usage will inevitably fall somewhat, so the existing datacentres will probably do the job.

"I met her on the alien spaceship."
"Oh really."
"Don't take that arch tone with me, Volodya. You're dead, remember? You don't get to be arch."
"What, there's a rule? You die, you forfeit your right to rise above a situation?"
..."Hell, I don't know. Be arch. You're Vladimir Nabokov. If you're not arch you're, I don't know, Raymond Carver."
"Anything but that," I say with a histrionic shudder. I've read his work. It feels as if he wrote it with a hammer. [loc. 3018]

A riotous, fast-paced, exuberant metafiction -- or 'sort of a novel', per the subtitle -- set at a (fictional) university in Liberal, Kansas. The story starts with a stage production of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin which not only breaks the fourth wall, but features Pushkin himself as a character. Theatre professor Kip Knurl is playing Pushkin, and his immersion in the role threatens his marriage. 

"He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something…there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.”[quote]

This does exactly what it says on the cover, and it is a delight. Patricia Campbell is a stay-at-home mother, married to Carter, who is a patronising git who cheats far from the ideal husband, though he does earn enough to keep Patricia and the kids -- Korey and Blue -- in the style to which they are accustomed. Patricia quits one book club because she'd bounced off Cry the Beloved Country and was encouraged to leave by Grace, the woman who ran the book club: instead, she joins a newly-formed book club that mostly seems to read true crime.

Which is probably why, when the charismatic James moves in next door, her initial liking quickly warps into suspicion. ( Read more... )

• Orbital

•  ‘Emembededed’ by Adam Roberts

• March, 19-21: God is a comedian
• Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, AND American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound? by Stephen Harding
• SpaceX now has more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit by Jonathan O'Callaghan 
• School book banning escalates in the UK as Greater Manchester secondary school censors scores of books by Katie Dancey-Downs

• “The Power of Poetry” by Brian Bilston

• (online) Peter’s Field (Sean Cooney, Sam Carter, and Rowan Rheingans)

• Hopetown, Darlington
• Woolsthorpe Manor