Luther M. Siler

Yeah, yeah, yeah, shelves, whatever. The good news is I’ve cleared out everything I bought in 2025! Let’s pretend that’s an achievement.

I take no pleasure in this. I was sent this book by Emily Renk Hawthorne’s publicist for a review– not only was I sent this book, but also the first book in the series, in a nice hardcover edition, and when I cracked this open to read it I discovered she’d actually sent me a copy with a signed bookplate in it, which genuinely makes me feel bad about how I’m going to review the book. I’m going to…

That absurdly tall, gloriously-haired kid on the right there— who is the same kid as this kid— graduated from 8th grade today. Which means that he is somehow a high school student now. Sooner than you might think, as he’s taking summer school classes right away and they start in a bit over a week. That fat bastard on the left is going to be fifty in a month. He is somehow still alive. I am…

That’s twenty-two years, I think? Twenty-three? Who the hell knows. One of the things that happened at the event we went to last night was recognition of three retiring faculty members, and in fact there was a reception immediately afterward for them that we did not attend. The three had been teaching for, respectively, 29 years, 36 years, and a staggering 42 years, all at the same school. If I…

I had two different possible plans for tonight’s post, and I’m putting both of them away for the time being– one of them because, well, it’s a book review and because of a family event tonight I haven’t finished the book yet (and, to be honest, I may need to ruminate on this one for a minute before writing it anyway) and the second because there is another related family event in a couple of days…

Come on, guys. It’s okay. It’s your old pal Luther, here. You can admit it. This is all one giant, decades-long piss-take, right? I finished Book Eight of this nonsense last night, nearly seven hundred pages in which absolutely nothing happens until the last twenty pages and then not much happens in the climax. I am going to finish this series this year, powered by pure spite and nothing else,…