Will you pass me my book?

With The Summer War, Naomi Novik has given us another fairy tale that only she can write. A story of the Fae, a story of words leveraged as power, of siblings learning to support one another in a struggling house. Accidental curses and twisting, webbed spells. A faerie castle, a crumbling world, a bridge in between that comes and goes with the seasons. Rich characters and a magical story in just 127 compact pages.

I recently read A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides by Gisele Pelicot

I don't know what I was expecting, probably something more similar to the cut-and-dry news articles I had read when I heard about her court case against her husband. But this book took a scenic tour through Gisele's entire life and relationship with her now ex-husband to get to the court preceedings because she publicly wanted to give context to the tragedy that happened to her.

Even though Gisele is a somewhat reluctant feminist icon, she does applaud the women who have felt empowered to speak up about abusive situations they've been in after hearing about her experiences.

I think the main point she wanted to make, as well as the byline to the book, is that shame has to change sides. For too long victims of rape and violence have been ashamed to speak up. But nobody should be shamed because they have experienced violence, the ones enacting the violence should be ashamed. This is something cultural that will have to change over time, but it should start now.

Final rating 5 out of 5 stars:

Please reblog the polls, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people read the excerpt with an open mind 💖📚 Title and author will be revealed after the poll's conclusion.

Amena isn't really right in her argument that creating killware would be like having a baby. Machine intelligences don't have familial relationships like that; they're created with intention to serve a function. But. The killware they create will be sentient, that's the whole point. It will be a person, a person ART and Secunit created together. So Amena isn't exactly wrong, either.

Secunit also isn't exactly wrong that killware is nothing like a child. It will be another iteration of Secunit, copied by ART into a killware framework. But. Being a copy doesn't make it not a person. Even if the kernal isn't changed at all by being copied into a new context, even if it's an exact duplicate, it will be a person. So Secunit isn't exactly right, either.

And ART.. the implications are very upsetting for ART, either way.

It can't argue that machine intelligences don't have families, not with its own family missing and possibly dead. It knows itself to be capable of familial love. It knows it will love the life it creates. Does that make it a parent?

Does it matter if the killware clone is Secunit or their offspring, when either way ART will be sending someone it loves off to die?

But—and this is where it really gets messy—the ART listening to Secunit and Amena argue is a copy of ART. A duplicate of its kernal, restored from a backup after the original was deleted. It has most of the memories of the murdered ART, but the killware will have memories from Secunit, too. If the killware is not Secunit, then is ART still itself? But if the killware is just a copy of Secunit and its death is an acceptable loss, then was ART ever really murdered?

Gen Meets the Magus

I leaned farther into the feather pillows on the seat and back of the chair. It was almost as good as clean clothes, and I couldn’t have gotten up if I had tried.

Of the books I've read thus far this year, if I had to pick out the one that was a viral TikTok hit I don't think I'd have bet on a dystopian novel written in French nearly 30 years ago. If I were cynical, I'd say the short page count, simple prose, and propulsive energy make it accessible. But what endures after reading is it's bracing loneliness and it's unanswered (unanswerable) questions. Our protagonist is an unnamed girl, kept captive with 39 women in an underground cage, under watch by whip-cracking guards at all times. Even as their world expands, no explanation is ever given for the women's imprisonment or where they find themselves.

I Who Have Never Known Men has moments of friendship, growth, curiosity, and cooperation, but mostly it is marked by the sense of being an outcast in an inexplicable world. Harpman, born in 1929 in Belgium to a Jewish father, spent her teen years in exile in Casablanca and lost much of her paternal family to Auschwitz. The novel can be read as the coming-of-age of a daughter of the Shoah—a girl inheriting a world irreparably changed, the lives & values of the older generation incomprehensible.

faves of 2025: sapphic

specifically sapphic-led books where I enjoyed the relationship and/or lesbian identity, these are not necessarily all happy-ending books. also kinda just the first things that came to mind!

Feast While You Can

The Isle In The Silver Sea

The Starving Saints

Ladies of the Living Princess

The Memory Hunters

A Sweet Sting of Salt

The Maiden and her Monster

When They Burned The Butterfly

Volatile Memory

Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame

Ten Incarnations of Rebellion

Fate’s Bane

i'm treating myself to a bookshop date tomorrow and will be going to the shops with the good horror sections :3 anyone got any recs for horror, esp queer horror or horror written by women?

I've already read and enjoyed:

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno Garcia (if you liked Mexican Gothic, you might also like this twist on HG Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau)

Aliens: Phalanx by Scott Sigler (you don't have to know much about the Alien franchise to get into this book, it takes place in a society without a lot of technology that calls them demons because they don't have a concept of space travel... but it's very good and the main character is a teenage girl)

Ones that I have my eye on but haven't read yet:

Bone Broth by Alex Taylor (queer horror graphic novel)

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman (medieval religious horror)

In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt (colonial female-focused horror)