Tiny Navajo Reads

Books of 2026: SEASONS OF GLASS AND IRON by Amal El-Mohtar.

Shocking everyone, I'm actually doing a halfway decent job of Reading Books That Came Out This Year, This Year!

THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR is one of my all-time favorite books. My first foray into Max Gladstone's solo work was fine™, but I vibed hard with El-Mohtar's RIVER HAS ROOTS, so I was supremely (and rightly!) stoked for this collection.

I appreciated the prickliness and sharpness of a lot of the women in these stories (Blue Time War, do you have cousins?? perhaps???), as well as the variety of genres and formatting styles. I was not expecting so much poetry, but all four of those were very raw and intense (and one was dual-language! Poetry Quest keeps going!!). There was a delightful amount of bird/wing motif action happening in here, and y'all know I love that.

Favorites (of which there were Many):

"The Lonely Sea in the Sky"

"And Their Lips Rang with the Sun" (loved the POV/frame narrative)

"Anabasis"

"To Follow the Waves"

"John Hollowback and the Witch" (also in the back of RIVER!)

"Florilegia; or, Some Lies About Flowers" (I flaggied this one for Future Writing Reference!)

"Pockets" (omg love ending on Relevant To My Current Writing Project yeah)

Also known as Super no Ura de Yani Suu Futari.

MyAnimeList synopsis under the cut.

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

“Summer passed by.”

The first days of the Valarney marriage aren’t told in detail. Why? Because of sex.

We are entering the phase where I read a sexual subtext into everything.

“The Stirling clan—with the insignificant exception of Cousin Georgiana”

Aww. Why “insignificant”?

“Valancy, bareheaded, with stars in her eyes. Barney, bareheaded, smoking his pipe. But shaved. Always shaved now, if any of them had noticed it.”

Barney is shaving because otherwise his beard tickles Valancy.

“I’m really quite a middle-aged dog. Thirty-five, if you’re interested in knowing.”

So we learn Barney’s age in a somewhat clumsy exposition. But I am glad to know.

“Valancy was happy—gloriously and entirely so. She seemed to be living in a wonderful house of life and every day opened a new, mysterious room.”

I love the second sentence. Another Bluebeard allusion?

“It was in a world which had nothing in common with the one she had left behind—a world where time was not—which was young with immortal youth—where there was neither past nor future but only the present. She surrendered herself utterly to the charm of it.

The absolute freedom of it all was unbelievable. They could do exactly as they liked. No Mrs. Grundy. No traditions. No relatives. Or in-laws.”

Part of the wish-fulfillment comes from the total lack of responsibility permitted by her impending death. That’s why the book’s ending is a tiny bit more ambivalent than you might think.

“Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away,” as Barney quoted shamelessly.”

The quote is from a hymn from 1875. I love how it applies to Barney’s background as well as Valancy’s, as we will learn.

“But it’s a lovely spread,” said Valancy, with a kiss”

Did Valancy just kiss Cousin Georgiana? That’s sweet.

“Valancy thought she was almost pretty in that mirror. But that may have been because she had shingled her hair.”

IT’S HAPPENING

THIS IS SO ICONIC

“This was before the day of bobs and was regarded as a wild, unheard-of proceeding—unless you had typhoid. When Mrs. Frederick heard of it she almost decided to erase Valancy’s name from the family Bible.”

When does this book take place? I still think it is the 1920s and Deerwood simply did not catch up to the fashion.

“Barney cut the hair, square off at the back of Valancy’s neck, bringing it down in a short black fringe over her forehead. It gave a meaning and a purpose to her little, three-cornered face that it never had possessed before. Even her nose ceased to irritate her.”

I like how she becomes prettier with a different hair-style that suits her. There is a lesson in this that I can’t articulate just now.

“Her eyes were bright, and her sallow skin had cleared to the hue of creamy ivory. The old family joke had come true—she was really fat at last—anyway, no longer skinny. Valancy might never be beautiful, but she was of the type that looks its best in the woods—elfin—mocking—alluring.”

I like this. Her sallow skin and thin frame were caused by being indoors and inadequate nourishment.

I last read...

The Stress Prescription: 7 Days to More Joy and Ease by Elissa Epel

what I wanted: helpful techniques to keep a step ahead of stress

what I got: a clear (and hopefully ultimately helpful) guide

The really interesting thing (imo) about this chapter of the book, is how it defines rest. It’s not talking just about sleeping, but also things like social connection and physical movement. So the 42% of your day that is rest might involve:

Meaningful conversation with someone you have a connection with

Exercising

Paying attention to your food, whether that’s shopping for it, cooking it or eating it

Socialising

Daydreaming

Each of us will need a different balance of these things, and each of these individual things will be different from person to person. The socialising and the meaningful connections might be IRL or it might be online - one of the examples in the book of something that counts as rest is “live-tweet Games of Thrones with a thousand fellow fans”.

It’s a really interesting book - definitely worth reading :)

“Before them lay Mistawis, like a scene out of some fairy tale of old time.”

Valancy was forbidden to read novels, but evidently she was not forbidden to read fairy tales or Shakespeare. Which might have been a weird sort of blessing in disguise - her imagination did not get prosaic as she aged.

“Supper was the meal Valancy liked best. The faint laughter of winds was always about them and the colours of Mistawis, imperial and spiritual, under the changing clouds were something that cannot be expressed in mere words. Shadows, too. Clustering in the pines until a wind shook them out and pursued them over Mistawis. They lay all day along the shores, threaded by ferns and wild blossoms. They stole around the headlands in the glow of the sunset, until twilight wove them all into one great web of dusk.”

I like this summer holiday vibe.

“How sweet it was to sit there and do nothing in the beautiful silence, with Barney at the other side of the table, smoking!”

This book almost makes you want to be in a romantic relationship with a man!!

“Music would drift to them alluringly from boats here and there, or from the verandahs on the big house of the millionaire on the biggest island.

“Would you like a house like that, Moonlight?” Barney asked once, waving his hand at it.”

Montgomery is finally starting to lay down some clues about Barney’s second secret identity.

“He had taken to calling her Moonlight, and Valancy loved it.”

This Moonlight nickname thing was also sneered at by the literary critics for being too cheesy and sentimental. I mean, it is cheesy I guess, but I don’t find it particularly unrealistic. People get goofy when they are in love, especially in the first months of a relationship. And I like it, I don’t care.

“Away down at the far end of the lake they got every night a glimpse of a big, continental train rushing through a clearing.”

The pieces are being laid for the climax of the novel…

Also this will be the railway Valancy’s father worked on in his youth in my fanfic Wu’s.

“So many hours a day Barney shut himself up in Bluebeard’s Chamber. Valancy never saw the inside of it. From the smells that filtered through at times she concluded he must be conducting chemical experiments—or counterfeiting money.”

What are those smells though? Ink?

“There is no such thing as freedom on earth,” he said. “Only different kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. You think you are free now because you’ve escaped from a peculiarly unbearable kind of bondage. But are you? You love me—that’s a bondage.”

I love this quote.

I also must say that I observed a tendency in everyone to view Barney simply as a Prince Charming/Giant Teddy Bear/Reward For Valancy. He indeed is quite a decent guy, but I think he is more cynical and “convincing as a man” than we sometimes give him credit for.

“Who said or wrote that ‘the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is’?” asked Valancy dreamily, clinging to his arm as they climbed up the rock steps.”

It is apparently from a poem of Wordsworth.

“Ah, now you have it,” said Barney. “That’s all the freedom we can hope for—the freedom to choose our prison.”

The central thesis of all romance novels voiced out. And I love it. This book is intelligent.

“But, Moonlight,”—he stopped at the door of the Blue Castle and looked about him—at the glorious lake, the great, shadowy woods, the bonfires, the twinkling lights—“Moonlight, I’m glad to be home again. When I came down through the woods and saw my home lights—mine—gleaming out under the old pines—something I’d never seen before—oh, girl, I was glad—glad!”