teach me the art of war

In chronological release order today.

Nosferatu (1922): I enjoyed this enormously! I think it might be the oldest film I've ever watched, so this was a fascinating look back at a modern art form in its infancy but also a genuinely rewarding piece of art on its own merits. Of all the Dracula adaptations I've seen, this one felt like it distilled the story down to its purest essence. It was incredibly clean, evocative storytelling; I didn't think it was possible for such an old version of such a familiar story to scare me, but some of those scenes of the advancing count with his spidery fingers and dead, staring eyes were genuinely chilling. Also, it is downright criminal that greatcoats for men are no longer in style. All men should wear greatcoats, all the time. And high-rise trousers, and cavalry boots, and those gorgeous floofy shirts and cravats. Loneliness epidemic, my arse. 'Dating is so hard for men these days', my arse. Put on a fucking greatcoat and watch the ladies all clamour to pass their dance cards under your nose.

The Ritual (2017): In honour of their friend who was killed in a burglary gone wrong, four ageing British uni mates go on a hike in the Swedish wilderness for which they are all utterly unprepared. But the comedy of errors turns deadly when they stray along a woodland "shortcut" and find themselves being stalked by some malevolent, godlike force that dwells among the trees. This had a really great atmosphere, stunning visuals, and a cast of forgettable idiots who I could 100% believe would make every single one of the stupid decisions that led to their demise. There was a moderately compelling emotional through-line about the guilt complex of the Main Forgettable Idiot (I have genuinely already forgotten his name) who was present at the burglary but froze up in fear instead of defending his friend. But mostly I was in it for the gorgeous, spooky tour of a Scandinavian forest, livened up every now and then by a disembowelment (tastefully depicted, as these things go!).

Oddity (2024): I'm struggling to describe the plot of this movie without either giving away major spoilers or just making it sound very silly. I don't want to make it sound silly at all. It has its moments of levity, but it also does a really good job of blending paranormal horror with a far more grounded and mundane human evil; I really enjoyed it. It's an Irish horror film about a woman with psychic abilities investigating the murder of her sister. It's a modern setting but with a rich, old-timey atmosphere, full of quaint antique shops and centuries-old converted houses (the main filming location was the old stables at Bantry House, a real 1730s heritage location in County Cork, Ireland) and the claustrophobic halls of an old forensic hospital. There are some great hauntings and supernatural scares but there are also just so many vibes. And the ending left me with a genuine smile on my face, which is not what I was expecting from a movie this dark.

The Ring (2002) was a reckless stretching of my "no child-related horror" boundary that fortunately did not backfire, mostly because I spoiled myself very thoroughly for the entire plot of the movie before watching a single minute. But with ample forewarning for the bad bits, not only did it not backfire but I actually enjoyed it more than I can remember enjoying a movie in years. This is phenomenally sad and scary paranormal horror about a cursed VHS tape that kills you seven days after you watch it, and a journalist fighting to solve the mystery of the tape before she and her young son succumb to its murderous power. Aesthetically it was exquisite: everything is wretchedly grey and rainy and minimalist, but somehow never dull. The visual horror was like the distilled essence of what the word "horror" means inside my head. The suspense and fear were great, but really the heart of this story is about motherhood, and the beautiful, terrible power mothers have to save or destroy their children.

( Spoilers )

I haven't decided yet if I will watch the sequel, but I almost definitely will watch the original Japanese film that spawned this adaptation.

Hit Man (2023): Philosophy teacher Gary loves his cats, his pot plants, his job, and birdwatching. He is amicably divorced from his ex-wife, who left him because she found him too steady and yearned for a more passionate lover. Good with tech, he works part time for the New Orleans police in a surveillance van attached to undercover missions. One day, the undercover cop he works with gets pulled off duty right before a planned sting, and Gary reluctantly takes over his role as a fake "hit man" whom their would-be murderer target is attempting to hire. He surprises everyone (himself included) by putting on such a stellar performance that he's asked to become the team's permanent undercover guy. He falls into a highly successful routine: drawing on his longstanding interest in human psychology, he researches his targets and creates a tailored persona to cater to each individual's fantasy of what a mythical hit man should be. But when Gary catches feelings for one of his intended targets - Madison, a beautiful housewife who in desperation to escape is considering having her abusive husband killed - his professionalism starts to slip, and his immersion in the tough, suave persona he designed for her starts to escape the bounds of his mission in ways that change his life forever.

This was fun! I don't have a huge amount to say beyond that. It was fun, gleefully silly, and well acted on Gary/Glen Powell's side. (Madison was played by Adria Arjona from Andor, and I can't tell if she genuinely can't act or has just been typecast as a flat, misogyny-tinged "sexy vulnerable girlfriend" whose roles give her nothing to work with.) They took the John Wick approach of making the victims such repulsive humans that you don't feel bad when they bite it. (Note, that is this film's only overlap with John Wick. Despite the title, it is not a murderfest!) It didn't have much by way of substance but was a very enjoyable way to pass two hours.

Crazy Rich Asians (2018) was also fun and also has not inspired me with many deep thoughts. Chinese-American economics professor Rachel Chu accompanies her boyfriend Nick Young on a trip home to Singapore to meet his family, about whom he has thus far in their relationship told her nothing. It turns out that the Young family are Singapore's foremost developers and property owners, a family of obscenely wealthy celebrities; Nick is the presumed heir to the family business and fortune, and his relatives are not impressed by his choice to involve himself with an Americanised nobody. Romcom tropes and high-stakes familial (melo)drama ensue.

Parts of the film felt like a travel ad for Singapore. One very gratuitous hawker centre scene in particular made me ravenous for Singaporean street food; there is also much ooh-ing and aah-ing over the city's architecture, and lavish displays of traditional culture in the family matriarch's mansion. The portrayal of the Young family's wealth played hopscotch along the border between lifestyle porn and existential horror; it's honestly kind of ghastly how rich they are. Like, unthinkably rich. Like, suck-all-the-joy-out-of-life rich. There's a very sad subplot where ( spoilers ) After all the luxury, I also really enjoyed the final scene where ( more spoilers ) Michelle Yeoh was also amazing as the disapproving mother - plot-wise she is firmly the antagonist striving to keep the happy couple apart, but she brought so much heart and nuance to the role that I was honestly half-cheering for her even as I hoped that Nick and Rachel would work things out.

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

~ Mad Girl's Love Song, 1953

This verse was quoted in an unrelated book I was reading; poetry only very rarely grips me as viscerally and immediately as these few lines did. I had to look up the full text online because it wasn't even included in my collected Plath edition. (It was worth looking up. Holy fuck, I love this poem!)

But then I had the collected Plath down from the bookshelf, so I figured I might as well keep reading. Here are some excerpts from a few favourites.

( Soliloquy of the Solipsist )

( Frog Autumn )

( April 18 )

( Dirge for a Joker )

I didn't read cover to cover, but one thing that stood out to me was how many more poems I liked from among the juvenilia than from her published volumes. That could be due to how they were collected - only 50, from a few hundred - but there's also a raw emotionality to these early efforts that connects with me more than some of her more sophisticated, "mature" work.

Also, Mad Girl's Love Song is still my favourite of them all. <3

New year, new reading icon! It may or not be my permanent choice - all my icons are due for a refresh, and there are so many to choose from, it's overwhelming.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: Man, I hate it when a certified Good Book(TM) that my friends all love and recommend doesn't land with me. This was fine! Enjoyable, even! I think if it had come less hyped - if I hadn't seen it blurbed all over the place as the definitive haunted house novel - then I'd probably have come away more impressed. I did enjoy the descriptions of the "vile" house, especially the carved children's faces whose gaze met on that malevolent cold spot. I wish (personal preference wish, not objective criticism wish) there had been more supernatural horror and less "is Eleanor just losing it" horror. The moments where the house's malevolence shone through - the stomps and banging in the night, the scrabbling fingers at the door - were the most electrifying parts of the novel for me, but there weren't very many of them. I liked the relationship between Eleanor and Theodora but I found that the fever-dream quality of the narration numbed a lot of its emotional impact.

IDK. For me this one is all like, no love; I just didn't find it as scary as I wanted to. It's going on the "good read, don't regret it, don't need to own a copy, probably won't revisit" shelf in my mind.

Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay: This one very much did scare me! Decades ago, the narrator starred as the monster in a horror movie that went tragically wrong during filming and was never released, but that achieved cult favourite status after the script and a handful of scenes got posted online. Today, Hollywood is clamouring to reboot the film, stirring up the memory of old horrors in the process.

The narrator was (intentionally) not a very charismatic personality and it took me a couple of chapters to get into the flow of things, but I enjoyed the slow-building dread and the trickle of reveals about what really happened on set. ( Heavy spoilers! )

Happy Place by Emily Henry: Harriet and Wyn broke off their engagement months ago because they wanted to live in different states and couldn't see a way around it, but their mutual friend group is having one last special-occasion reunion so they have to pretend they're still together. The trouble is, they're not over each other. 400 pages of nostalgic pining ensue. It's genre romance, so you guys already know how it ends.

You know how sometimes you'll read a book and be like, 'This has some interesting themes that the author has clearly put a lot of thought into!' And then you read another book by the same author and you're like 'Oh, maybe these are actually the only thing this author thinks about?' If you and the author happen to be on the same wavelength, that can be a good thing. But if you're not...yeah, this just wasn't for me. I already read one Emily Henry book about a couple who value their personal goals and careers over their relationship and who are ready to walk away from each other until they serendipitously discover a solution that lets them have everything they want with no compromise; I didn't really need another. I also just didn't think this version of the story was as well executed as Book Lovers. It was too long. Scenes that had the potential to be fun and/or poignant - everyone doing weed gummies together, the heroine practising her pottery hobby, the best friends all reminiscing about their university flatshare - dragged on and on for what felt like forever. The conflict behind the breakup could have been easily resolved at the outset with communication and a small amount of mutual flexibility, but the narrative is anti-compromise to a surprisingly strident degree. I can't tell whether the whole "we're soulmates who can't/won't be together because of ~our careers~" thing is a values statement or a just scenario the author finds iddy enough to be worth doing twice, but either way, it's not one that particularly tugs my personal heartstrings. It probably doesn't help that I listened to the novel as an audiobook, and the narrator insisted on pronouncing every. single. line. with this breathy, wistful, wow-so-profound intonation that was wearing thin by the end the first chapter. Still, I liked it enough to keep listening to the end, and that's not nothing. I nope out of audiobooks even more freely than regular books, but this one had enough charm and chemistry to keep me going despite being bored half the time and not actually liking or agreeing with the premise. I guess there's a reason Emily Henry writes nothing but bestsellers.

Cheers to the new year! I've been waiting for Yuletide author reveals so that I could officially make this brag: I've posted over 150k words to AO3 this past year, trouncing my previous record of 120k in 2019. 2025 has been so intense for me creatively. This has been a year not only of prolific writing, but of pushing my boundaries, expanding my storytelling ambitions, and just straight-up enjoying my own imagination without angsting over feedback or popularity. I won't attempt to look back at all 41 (!) fics here, but I'd like to talk about a few of the big projects/moments and what I've taken from them.

Prisons of Our Making (Reylo, post-TROS Ben Solo Lives AU, 35k): I know it's small change to a lot of authors, but this is the longest fic I've ever finished. (My longest fic full stop is 66k, but it's a nearly-finished perma-WIP from years ago that I hate and no one is allowed to talk to me about it.) This was me experimenting with a whole new writing process. I've historically always been both a plan-as-you-go and edit-as-you-go writer; for this fic I forced myself to outline the whole thing before I started writing, then write the whole thing before I edited anything, and not post a single word until I was satisfied that the structure was sound and only copyedits on later chapters remained to be done. I found this process less fun in the short term but significantly less frustrating in the long - I have a well established habit of writing myself into corners and introducing late-stage twists that require major rewrites to earlier material, and this method avoided all of that.

I should note that, unusually for me, I have not actually reread a word of this fic since posting it. I'm a bit scared to. Like, what if it's rubbish? What if I am just fundamentally a shortfic author who should stick to writing oneshots? I'll probably revisit it sometime this year once the emotions have calmed down a bit, but whether or not I end up being thrilled with the final product, it definitely feels like a milestone that I got this out into the world.

It Takes a Village to Raise the Dead (Poe/Finn/Rey/Ben/Jacen resurrection bodyswap, 20k) was an exchange assignment that got stupidly out of control, and an example of what happens when I try to write long(er)fic using the as-you-go method instead of the one discussed above. It wasn't actually meant to be longfic at all - it started its life as fairly modest bodyswap shenanigans using the Force as a wafer-thin excuse - but then it bred with several other prompts and grew a plot, and the whole thing was just absolute chaos. Multiple rewrites, at least one of which was literally from scratch while others involved POV changes that completely changed what information I could or couldn't include in that scene. If it weren't for an exchange I would probably have given up. But hey, this is part of why I got so into exchanges to begin with - deadline pressure really works for me. This is another fic I'm still waiting to get enough distance from before I can reread it, but at minimum I'm proud of myself for getting it done! It involved a lot more balls in the air at once than I usually even attempt to juggle.

I Can Save Myself (Kylo/Rose superhero AU, 10k) is the "shorter", "easier" exchange assignment I wrote when I DID actually have to give up on a fic that had gotten too complicated. My first idea was for the same ship but a much more serious take on it, heavy on both plot and emotional trauma, and I wrote thousands of words and did oodles of comics canon review and Wookieepedia research before realising that it just wasn't going to come together the way I wanted it to in the time I had left. I was right on the brink of defaulting so that my soon-to-be-ex-recip could get a gift that didn't suck, but I took one last look at their request to see if there was anything I could salvage, and the words "superhero AU" jumped out at me from their likes list. I'd just recently read Hench. Suddenly, I was off and running. It was still way more than I really had time to write before deadline, but it was too much in the fun way instead of the despair-inducing way, and I bashed the whole fic out in a blur of joy and the recip ended up making fanart for it!!! So that was a fantastic experience.

Rose Tico's Charity Home for Wayward First Order Scum (post-TROS Reylo, Finnpoe, Phasma/Rose, Phasma/Kylo, Everyone Lives with bonus drinking games, 1.6k): There is nothing technically ambitious about this fic, but it's the direct product of the exact moment early on this year when I looked at the word doc in front of me and said "fuck it, I can do what I want". Some people just like to write about their favourite enemy space wizards inexplicably all being friends and acting like teenagers together, and that's valid! In the end a double-digit number of people liked this fic enough to kudos it, but I put it out in the world fully expecting silence and was okay with that because I loved (still love) what I wrote and would have continued to love it even if no one else did.

All seven of my Love Hypothesis fics: Look at me, diving headlong into a whole new fandom without dropping out of my old one in the process! This has never actually happened before; usually my head only has room for one (1) primary blorbo, with all other fannish interests restricted to dabblings and day trips. It's been really fun noodling around with Adam and Olive as characters. Despite the fact that The Love Hypothesis started its life as Reylo fic, the vibes are completely different, and it's scratching a different creative itch for me than any star war I've written. Right now I'm working on a new multichapter fic for this fandom (*puts on galaxy-brain hat* it's a fake dating AU...for the fake dating AU...) and just having so, so much fun with it in a way that feels really chill and low-pressure.

On a slightly less satisfying note, as the year progressed my writing has been feeling more and more like...you know when a kid has a growth spurt, and overnight they acquire about 20% more limb than before but don't yet know how to control it? Yeah, it's like that. It's frustrating, because while the new sense of freedom and reach is amazing, I used to feel much more in control of my prose and overall technique. I imagine that'll come back as I adjust to my new limb length, but man, I wish I could have brought all the creative energy I've had this year and felt like I was putting it into my best work yet, instead of the constant nagging awareness that even my most carefully controlled works aren't quite coming out exactly the way I want them to. It's been years since I last felt that gap between my vision and my skills, and I did not miss it.

I'm including that last bit in the post for my own posterity, but honestly, I don't want to sound like I'm ending on a sour note because my overwhelming experience this year has been that writing is FUN and I LOVE it and I WANT TO BE DOING IT ALL THE TIME. I'm deliberately not setting myself any writing goals for 2026 because I want to just keep going with the flow of whatever the fuck my brain is doing these days. Whether the energy lasts or whether I end up going fallow again for a while, I'm going to resist the urge to force things and just trust that whatever output I manage this year will be exactly what I need it to be.

Look at me, reading things in a timely fashion!

Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher was a very compelling, immersive read that I...don't know how I feel about? I enjoyed it a lot as I was reading it and I have all the respect in the world for the consciously and intentionally batshit choices Kingfisher made within it, but, well, it was batshit. Not my preferred kind of batshit, either, and not a kind that the first half of the novel led me to expect. I was there just vibing so hard with the stark desert atmosphere and building sense of supernatural horror, when suddenly, we learnt that the malevolent force of evil pursuing the heroine was ( SPOILERS ) and that the mysterious Catholic priest helping her was ( MORE SPOILERS ). I had been hoping for something very different, something more anchored in fear and dread and the oppressive vastness of the desert, and it all felt like a bit of a letdown.

On the other hand, I did really like the badass elderly lady character who took up as the heroine's snarky magical guardian (I have now read two T. Kingfisher novels, and both of them prominently featured a badass elderly lady character who took up as the heroine's magical guardian; is this a theme with her or a weird Two Nickels situation?) and I'm always going to cheer for any author who says "fuck it" to marketability and just follows their bliss. Get it, T. Kingfisher! ( SPOILER ) that ( SPOILER )!

Slow Gods by Claire North was...how do I put this? A worthwhile slog. I'm very glad I read it and would heartily recommend it to other space opera fans. But it took a full 50% of the book before I started enjoying it enough to want to sit down and read more than a few chapters at a time, and even then, it never reached the propulsive levels I always hope for in a work of this type. It's fundamentally a story of ideas, not of characters; of large-scale ethical conversations, not ordinary human emotions. I was never once tempted to DNF but it also lacked any element that would have helped me personally invest in the narrative.

Mawukana na-Vdnaze is born on one of the lower social rungs of a hypercapitalist dystopian society, in a setting where human civilisation has expanded throughout the galaxy but faster-than-light travel is too dangerous to be attempted without very good reason. Exceeding the speed of light requires entering arcspace, a dimension of darkness that sometimes swallows whole ships and invariably, within a few flights, destroys the mind of every pilot who navigates through it. Maw is conscripted as a pilot and dies on his first flight, along with everyone else on board. But he is brought back, an "imperfect copy of himself", a mostly human body in which the unknowable consciousness embodied in arcspace can dwell to sate its curiosity about the world. He doesn't age, can't be killed in a way that lasts, and - most crucially for the plot - can pilot through arcspace as often as he likes, sustaining no psychological damage and never losing any passengers or cargo to the dark. Thus he becomes a valuable chess piece for more sophisticated players to move around the board of a massive interplanetary cold war aggravated by equally massive environmental catastrophe.

Good sci-fi is always about something real, and this book is about so many things. It's about the climate crisis and the evils of unchecked capitalism, about western imperialism and the war in Ukraine, about gender and neurodiversity and seemingly every possible issue of personal identity. It balances these themes well, but that is still a LOT of themes, and without much in the way of a more concrete anchor. I think the main point of disconnect for me is that I didn't care even a tiny bit about the book's central relationship. I liked Maw a lot as a protagonist but didn't like his love interest and was unconvinced by their short yet supposedly life-changing fling, and without that buy-in, Maw's whole character arc just fell a tiny bit flat. I feel like I'm going to be picking pieces of the book's worldbuilding and philosophical ideas from between my teeth for ages, but on an emotional level it has already passed through me like water and left little behind. Very strange experience. But since I've ended up giving more space to critiques than praise - always easy to do - let me just say again that I'm very impressed with this book, think that overall it succeeds in its large scope, and am really glad I took the time to read it. Also, the tinges of cosmic horror are wonderfully creepy.

Fandom: I'll make a separate post about my own year's writing later this month (once my last couple of exchange fics are revealed lol) but in general terms, this has been a really good fannish year for me! The Legacy of Vader comics have kicked my obsession with Star Wars back into overdrive (I still pinch myself every time I think about just how good to me they've been). I also found myself unexpectedly fannish about The Love Hypothesis, which turns out to have a thriving and quite active little fandom.

I only signed up to a handful of exchanges but received some truly gorgeous gifts - special mention has to go to ambiguityisnoonesfriend who 1) has never once written me a fic that wasn't an insta-fave but most especially 2) went and actually bought the relevant issues of the Kylo comic (which released barely before deadline) for the sole purpose of gifting me this perfect ficlet about my horrible new blorbo. Just opening the link again to copy it here has me grinning hard enough to hurt.

Books: This year I continued my streak of reading more fiction. According to my Goodreads tracking, I've read 29 new novels/novellas this year so far and will likely finish one or two more by the end of the year. (I don't track DNFs, rereads, books that are long-term in-progress reads, short stories, poems, or books that I've intentionally only read bits of.) I've also read some longform nonfiction, mostly Christian stuff, but for the purposes of this post I've only counted the fiction.

Trends of interest: most of my reading has been adult SFF, with minor forays into romance, mystery and horror. Virtually all of it has been by female authors, the sole exception being one single Stephen Graham Jones novel. This isn't an intentional project but an organic phase I seem to be going through in my interests - I'm just feeling far more drawn to women's voices at the moment. Most of this year's protagonists have been women, too, and all the romance has been M/F or F/F.

I'm not going to try and pick a favourite book of the year. I've read so much good stuff and am feeling very creatively nourished.

This has also been my year for audiobook adoption. I can still only really listen to books I've read before (or books that are really formulaic and easy to follow) because I tend to intermittently zone out, but pretty jigsaw puzzle + nice familiar audiobook has become one of my favourite ways to unwind on tired evenings.

Music: This year I managed to mostly quarantine the kids' music onto the Youtube Music app so that my Spotify stats actually mean something. (I need to get the fuck off Spotify and start buying my music again; I'm thinking of making it a project/resolution for next year.) That said, the stats haven't told me anything I didn't already know. I've had a fairly unadventurous year, listening mostly to the same few artists on repeat. Top three:

• The Night Eternal, especially their album Moonlit Cross
• Unto Others - I'm still hooked on Never, Neverland from last year
• Iron Maiden (I don't need to link you guys to Iron Maiden).

I've also been regularly listening to Bolt Thrower, 1914, Rotting Christ and Sisters of Mercy. I went through a short-lived fad for pop cello music and an AFI nostalgia phase; I also generally tend to spin up my old mid-2000s emo faves on the rare occasions I get drunk. They no longer bring me much artistic satisfaction but they are very, very nostalgic.

I'd like to pay a bit more attention to new releases next year, but we'll see. I've been enjoying my stint of comfort listening.

TV and movies: I've barely glanced at the telly all year, let alone made it to the movie theatre. IDK, nothing has interested me that much and I'd usually rather be reading. The only things I was excited for were Murderbot and season two of Andor, both of which ended up being disappointments - but more of the 'I've moved on and forgotten about them' than the resentful variety.

I did enjoy watching The Terror, though again, I haven't thought much about it since finishing the last episode.

Listen. I don't have time to write a proper recap right now, but I need you guys to know as a matter of urgency that Kylo Ren spent the entirety of today's issue frolicking around Fortress Vader in his underpants.

( Cut for frolicking! )

This is the sequel to Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, which I read and enjoyed a few months ago. My last review is here, but to recap: Vera is bored and lonely middle-aged woman who runs a tea shop in San Francisco's Chinatown. She inserts herself into a murder investigation, adopts a gaggle of lost Zoomer ducklings, and is in general a nosy, pushy, endearingly batty character with glowing good intentions and a knack for getting shit done. I absolutely love her as a character and in principle I am very on board with her becoming a new detective character in an ongoing book series.

I just ... I think this new book may have stretched itself a bit too far. I hate even saying that, because I LOVE Sutanto for the topic she chose to tackle and I do actually believe there's a place for playful approaches to serious issues. Not everyone has it in them to read heavy misery lit or dark real-world thrillers (hi, it's me, I'm Not Everyone) but still wants to broaden their awareness of the world and its many dark sides. There was a lot in this book that really did work, but the way it all resolved just broke my suspension of disbelief.

I'm talking circles around the issue, so let's be upfront: this is a cosy amateur sleuthing novel about a human trafficking ring.

That's not a spoiler. One of the major characters is introduced very early on as someone who has been trafficked; the tension comes from wondering exactly how Vera will solve the mystery, rather than any suspense over what the solution will be. What I will say without revealing any more specifics is that the stakes are just too high. Vera is a character well suited to investigating accidents or isolated crimes within her neighbourhood; she's not equipped to tackle major organised crime. The believable version of this story ended with Vera dead or in witness protection.

But like I said, I do love that Sutanto took this beast by the horns and decided she was going to make her audience ride it with her. I think human trafficking is one of those subjects where popular awareness is sensationalised, borderline eroticised - we picture the Taken style of kidnappers snatching up conventionally attractive young women to staff their glamorous brothels - but far more common in reality are boring-ugly horror stories of impoverished, undereducated people ensnared by employment scams and forced to do shitty, menial work under abusive conditions. This book really understands that, and has enormous respect and compassion for trafficking victims, especially those who are then coerced to behave in less than prosocial ways themselves. It's also a quick, compelling read that despite its dark focus captures much of the magic and fun of the first book. I don't not recommend it. Come love Vera Wong with me, guys! Just ... I don't know, be ready for some tonal whiplash in this one.

The epilogue has Vera jetting off to France. I hope the next instalment in the series will be a hilarious Parisian caper that takes full advantage of its intensified culture clash possibilities.

Snagged from osprey_archer, because who can resist a good book meme?

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire has a badass cover. I assume it'll prove to be yet another tedious canon-rehashing moneygrab, but that very Star Wars typical style of unsubtle symbolism always gets me somehow.

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

Oh, this one has me stumped! I've read plenty of books that I guess could be considered challenging in terms of length/prose/vocab - Dostoevsky, Joyce (though I've never attempted Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses) and some of the earlier Gothic literature all spring to mind - but I only ever really read for pleasure; if I'm enjoying something then it doesn't feel hard, and if I'm not enjoying it, I just give it up and pick something else. I did read a bunch of untranslated Latin and Greek during undergrad, including the whole first book of the Iliad, which definitely qualified as a challenge. But I didn't read the whole Iliad in Greek, so that feels like a cheat answer.

I also wouldn't call The Lord of the Rings unduly challenging for an adult reader, but it probably counted as a pretty big challenge when I finished it (and memorised big chunks of the poetry, and forced my parents and grandparents to attend tedious recitations thereof) at age eight. I was a weird kid.

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

SO MANY. I go through long, regular phases where new stories feel too hard and I just want to wallow in things I already know I'll enjoy because I've enjoyed them before. Just the other day I finished a reread of Star Wars: Bloodline, and a bit before that I did Pride and Prejudice. I tend to revisit my favourite SFF series a lot in dribs and drabs: Murderbot, the Imperial Radch, Tolkien, Narnia and Harry Potter (the latter not so much these days) are a few I've reread often enough to have largely committed to memory.

I also read Spot Bakes A Cake roughly ten times a day at the moment, but that's not by preference and probably not what the creator of this meme had in mind.

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

...also SO MANY. I think the award probably has to go to Madame Bovary, which was assigned reading back in one of my Year Eleven English classes and the only book in my whole educational career for which I ever resorted to Cliffnotes. Fuck, I hated that book. But ever since then I've been meaning to go back and finish it, to wipe the red stain of that youthful defeat (and semi-fraudulent essay) off my ledger.

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

I have three editions of Shakespeare's collected works. My favourite is quite delicate, won as a prize by my mum in school and printed on Bible-thin paper; the second, not too much less nice, belonged to my father-in-law I believe; the third is a rather tatty lump of a book that I picked up cheap at a secondhand store for the sake of owning a Shakespeare I actually feel safe reading. Speaking of Bibles, I also own three of those: my pretty little clothbound NRSV for regular reading, my big chunky NIV Study Bible, and a copy of the New Testament in the original Koine Greek.

I have two collected Blinky Bills floating around, one paperback sized and one larger with bigger pictures for the kids. As a household we also have a few duplicated marital assets: both my husband and I were gifted copies of (the exact same edition of) The Lord of the Rings by our respective fathers, and we both have our childhood copies of Harry Potter. I think husband also has a second copy of The Silmarillion floating around in his office somewhere, though I'm not sure why, because he hasn't read it any wouldn't like it.

6. Wrath, books I despised.

osprey_archer reminded me that I hate His Dark Materials. Not for any handwringing religious reasons - I just found the whole thing about children being severed from their daemons too upsetting, even as a kid without the massive child cruelty squick I nurse today. And I think I've always been a hard sell on multiverses; from memory, the characters were going through some kind of portal into modern England around the time I gave up. It all felt like a disappointing mirror version of C.S. Lewis.

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

I'd love to live in the Tolkienverse, provided I could be incarnated as a Hobbit and stay put in the Shire eating cheese while my biggers and betters did all the adventuring.

Having just finished The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, I kind of wouldn't mind living in her magical reality. I loved how structured and academic the system of magic was, and that anyone could in theory learn it regardless of natural aptitude.