cahn

I am super not promising to always have this on Saturday, but yay long weekend!

Last week: I know some of you reading this study Talmud -- Josephus asserts at the very beginning that the "sufferings of the Jews" (presumably, in context of Josephus' writing, Titus destroying the temple, etc. though we won't get there for a while) are their own fault: "no foreign power is to blame." It was pointed out that the Talmud may (?) have its own opinion(s) as to whether the destruction of the Temple and the resulting diaspora was divine punishment? And regardless of the former, may also blame Titus? (I also don't know yet, because we haven't gotten there yet and won't for a while, whether Josephus himself thinks it's divine punishment or just plain old temporal consequences. My vague recollection of Feuchtwanger's Josephus is that he was thinking more of the latter, which is also very much borne out by this week's reading.)

This week: First half of Book 1 (Ch 22 / Par 444):

Okay, I must say the first part of this was a slog for me -- flitting between a lot of people I didn't know. Good thing we have this reading group or I might not have got through it. As it was, I had to take copious notes to even make a stab at writing up a summary (I won't promise I'll do this every week, but I had a little extra time and quite frankly I knew I wouldn't remember who any of these people were next week if I didn't), and I'm going to put them in comments so this post doesn't get super long. At least Josephus felt it was "inappropriate to go into the early history of the Jews," which would have made it really long. Anyway, it got substantially more interesting once Herod showed up!

Next week: Finish book 1.

thistleingrey mentioned that it was a solid depiction of academia and characters in academia, which immediately piqued my interest. I have read Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis and enjoyed it, and I know Hazelwood is in academia, but I sometimes thought... well, let's just say that it's a romance between a grad student and the young hotshot professor in her department, and... okay... that part... is totally realistic actually... but I feel like I kind of got stuck a lot in all my feelings about the potential deep pitfalls. Hypothesis was also, I think, much more concerned with primarily being a romance novel and secondarily a novel about academia.

Anyway, this is unabashedly a romance novel, complete with marriage-of-convenience and sometimes even the one-bed trope, but without any particular kinks like professor/student :P But the thing that makes it interesting (to me) is that it's at least as interested in both the experiences of the precariat (*) and also familial relationships as it is in the romance itself. In fact, it does not have a conventional romantic Act 3; here the Act 3, as well as the understandable but frustrating misunderstandings that prolong it, is passed squarely on to the familial relationships rather than the romantic ones. Which I personally really like!

The two main characters, Jonah and Sadie, are adorably academics. (**) I laughed out loud when Jonah said, "I'm all for radically revised gender roles in the heteronormative institution of marriage, but I should still pay for my wife's engagement ring," if only because I've never heard anyone else talk that way in a romance novel -- though if you have, please rec it to me. (Their engagement is the aforementioned engagement-of-convenience and the ring is $27.99, I hasten to append, and she pays for his ring.) (lol, I think I actually paid for my engagement ring, because it was an important transaction involving me and an important piece of jewelry -- what?)

Anyway, I rarely like romance novels, but I liked this one!

(*) I did not know the term precariat: the precarious proletariat, that insecure class of unstable work and low wages -- but I was familiar at least by reputation with the academic pre-tenure-track life that the term describes, in the sense that it is one of the many reasons why I did not pursue academia

(**) Jonah likes using footnotes; I guess your mileage may vary but I found it adorable, perhaps inevitably

Our beloved problematic author, Flavius Josephus, with the wild plot twist in the middle! Is anyone still interested in doing this thing?

I have the Oxford World Classics edition; I looked around and I liked this translation, and it's got copious footnotes. Each "book" is a little less than 100 pages on my kindle, and I think I can probably read about 50 pages every week (we can see how it goes and whether I can go faster or must go slower), so I propose dividing the first "book" into two, and reading half one week and half the next. (I did read the intro this past week, but I'm not sure how much I got out of it.) selenak, would you be able to find a good dividing point of that first book? My goal would be to post every weekend (probably on Sunday, but depending on time) on the reading thereof.

I also feel I should open up this post for general classics discussion if anyone wants it. Depending on how my reading goes I also reserve the right in this post to review whatever other random classics-related or modern-historical-novels-set-in-the-time-of-the-classics reading I do.

This book, via selenak, was just very relevant to my interests and I adored it so much! It's one of those books that I didn't really want to end. It's a retelling of the Aeneid from the point of view of the Sybil, with nods towards making it Bronze-Age historically plausible.

Gull begins her life as the daughter of a slave in Pylos, and is apprenticed to the Pythia, the oracle of the Lady of the Dead, becoming Pythia herself when the current Pythia dies. After Troy (here called Wilusa) is sacked for the second time, the black ships of the Wilusan prince Aeneas and the remnants of his people land in Pylos to try to capture back some of their people who had been slaves (including Gull's mother, though by that time she has died). When they depart, Gull/Pythia goes with them as their Sybil on their sea adventures as the People search for a home...

I just really loved so many things about this, starting with that retellings of epic poems are always my jam. I loved Gull/Pythia and the way in which centering her and her experiences centers the lived experience of the women of Wilusa. I loved the way that Aeneas and the Wilusans are portrayed as refugees, because that's what they are. I loved that the gods, while they do appear on the edges, are mysterious beings that may be real and may be wholly belief; and that they aren't toddler-level petty and vindictive like in the Aeneid. I loved how Pythia and Xandros had that sort of fealty-love thing going with Aeneas, uh, not that this is a hardcore thing I love or anything.

Of course I was very curious about how Dido would be portrayed, even without knowing (as Graham says in her afterword) that Carthage didn't... actually... exist during this time period, so that Aeneas & Dido would have to at the very least be revamped. ( Mild thematic spoilers. )

One of the things that's really interesting here is the through-line of how the world is getting worse, piracy is getting worse, civilization is crumbling. Gull/Pythia can see that all of this is getting worse during her journeys with the black ships, and has gotten worse since the previous Pythia's days. And yet, as the reader knows, and as Pythia comes to dimly see, the arc of civilization since that time will curve upwards, and Aeneas will be part of that. (And I find this a somewhat comforting thought in some ways...)

I'm rather impressed that this was Graham's first book, which I had no idea about until I finished and went looking for more books by her! Occasionally there may have been a tiny bit of unevenness, but it just manages to weave together so many things in a way that I admired so much, and I thought it was extremely strong, much less as a debut! Sooooo now I'm gonna reread Judith Tarr's Lord of the Two Lands to get myself in a proper Alexander mood, and then I shall go on to read Graham's Stealing Fire :D

Via selenak <3 This book is a novelistic look primarily at the women (specifically the wives and lovers) associated with the most famous Romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats). It is well-written and compelling, extremely relevant to my interests, and also part #12345 or so of an ongoing series of "Reasons why I, especially as a woman, am glad I did not live hundreds of years ago" (which... I guess... is probably a good thing for me to keep in mind, these days...) and, as sort of a corollary to that, an implicit stirring polemic in favor of no-fault divorce and antibiotics. (Neither of which existed at the time, of course, but gosh, no-fault divorce and antibiotics would have made SO many people's lives so much better in this book!) Also against bloodletting :PP

Our best-beloved high school Brit Lit teacher, Dr. M, told us all kinds of stories about these people. He was, I think, a proponent of the "teach the kids literature and literary history through sensationalistic gossip" mode that I found in salon many years later -- and it works! Even decades after Dr. M's class, I came in knowing enough that the names and many of the love-affairs (especially the most sensationalistic ones) were familiar, though of course I didn't know very many details. Even (especially?) Byron; though we never read any Byron in class, he was certainly a very sensational figure. (I think Dr. M's plan was that we would go off and read Byron on our own -- the same way that he announced, when we did the Canterbury Tales, that he was forbidden to teach us "The Miller's Tale" because of it being too R-rated, and we all promptly hared off and read it outside of class -- although I found Byron enough not to my taste that I never read very much of him even with that.)

What I was struck by most about this book was just how trapped the women are by... everything, by societal expectations, societal disapproval, family situations, the constant spectre of sickness and death; all the women were more-or-less (sometimes less) sympathetic but were placed in situations where they were either miserable or making other people miserable or both. (I can't quite say that about the men -- there were a couple of men that were not very sympathetic -- but at the same time you could see them all being trapped too.) But I didn't get the impression that the author was trying to make a point about that in particular, or at least not any more than any other point; I think this was just how it was.

A few notes about some of the women POV characters:

Augusta Byron (Leigh) - I knew enough to draw in a breath when her half-brother George was mentioned, even before the reveal of her last name :P Anyway, she is awesome, my favorite -- a truly nice character but never boring, and you can see why she and Byron got along so well; their bantering conversations in the book are really some of my favorite bits. Definitely one of the characters where I was Put Out that her life was as miserable as it was :P Lord Byron himself was charming and dark and you could both see why everyone fell in love with him and also that it must have been awful to have been his wife or lover (though in Augusta's case, mostly because of the societal issues).

Mary (Godwin/Wollstonecraft) Shelley - Intellectual and intense, the Mary POV sections were perhaps the most compelling for me, and also could be frustrating, in the way that when you empathize with a character, you don't want the character to do the stupid things that you know you would do (or maybe actually did as a young person) in her place :P I felt like she had a lot of extremely understandable strong feelings! And often you could see how the strong feelings were acting against her best interests! Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the other hand, was... well... there's an xkcd about guys like him :P I also really enjoyed her scenes with Byron, of all people -- very platonic, no attraction, and that's actually very refreshing, to me as well as to the characters.

Caroline Lamb - these were my least favorite sections. I remembered from Dr. M that she had some struggles with mental illness, and Morgan makes her manic behavior quite as sympathetic as possible -- but it still wasn't all that fun to read for me. William Lamb was less of a presence in the book but seemed, well, passive and patriarchical but mostly pretty reasonable, especially in comparison to Byron and Shelley. Not that this is saying a whole lot!

Annabella Millbank (Byron) - Byron's long-suffering wife. Annabella is clearly -- in fact textually -- even less of a reliable narrator than the others. I found the style of her sections really interesting -- they're distant and mannered and very distinct from the other characters' POV, and really point up how she fabricates her own story that may or may not (often does not) match up to reality, but certainly matches up to her own interests. And at the same time Byron was just terrible to her! But one can see how she is almost optimally ill-suited to him! selenak told me about how she was absolutely horrible to their daughter, Ada Lovelace, and that is certainly consistent with the way her character is delineated here.

Fanny Brawne - I think part of why Fanny was here was just as a contrast to the other characters. (Keats doesn't interact particularly strongly with Byron and Shelley.) She seems to be the only one, out of all of them, whose issues don't arise out of an intensely conflicted adolescence, whether it was because of her circumstances (Mary -- I haven't mentioned her father, William Godwin, but he was a piece of work in the novel, one of those guys who can totally twist everything to "rationally" argue how it benefits him; the type is familiar) or because of her personality (Caroline). She is the only one where it seems like she actually maybe had fun. (Well, Augusta may have had fun in her childhood -- but the way the chapters are laid out, the awful parts of her life get a lot more documentation.) Of course one knows it all has to go wrong, because Keats and Brawne, but after reading about everyone else it's almost a relief to just be dealing with death instead of death plus a whole ton of dysfunction. (Of course, there are hints that if he had lived, perhaps this love story too would also have devolved into dysfunction. But maybe it wouldn't have. For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!)

But, in conclusion: no-fault divorce for Harriet Shelley and Annabella Byron, please and thank you, and hey, I'll take it for Mary Shelley too, and alllllll the antibiotics and NO bloodletting for not just Keats and Byron but also all the babies and small children who died in this book >:(

Also, I did a little reading about the next generation and they all seem rather interesting too; I want the sequel :PP

I would like to show you a thing mildred_of_midgard, selenak, and I have been working on! Two things :D Two covers of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," 18th-century versions!

Chronological, Prussian-centric version:



Non-chronological, Euro-centric (but not quite as Prussian-centric) one:



These were inspired by the Hildegard von Blingin' medieval/Renaissance cover that came out a year and a half ago. Clearly this was not something salon could let stand without trying to produce its own 18th-century version. (In fact, selenak posted about it on her DW and within twenty-four hours I was reading not one but TWO first drafts, one written by selenak and the other by mildred_of_midgard!)

So then we were committed to putting this thing together. It obviously took a while from there (quite a lot of that gap was unfortunately due to me, as I had limited times that I could record properly, and it took me a while to figure out the best way to do it -- the last time I did something even faintly like this was in grad school). mildred_of_midgard is the real MVP in terms of doing all the video/video-audio syncing, which was a LOT. Also: I apologize abjectly for pronunciation, which has never been my strength even in English, let alone anything else. But I hope you enjoy anyway! (And of course if you have any questions as to what any of the lines refer to, feel free to ask here or there and someone will answer! :D )

Merry Christmas and happy Yuletide!

At some point I'll post more about the Christmas part of it (summary: very long day, ended up being fine but was not so sure it would be earlier in the day), but bc of RL holiday commitments I may not get around to yuletide recs (I will try my best, though!) and I wanted to make sure I mentioned my amazing Yuletide presents, especially since the fandoms weren't wrangled for, uh, well, all three of them, but two of them didn't even have Unspecified Fandom and so didn't show up in the fandoms list for a while. Although they're there now, all hail the Yuletide mods and fandom wranglers!!

In the order in which they were received:

Courting the Chamberlain (3740 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sieben Jahre - Tanja Kinkel, 18th Century CE RPF, Unspecified Fandom
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Caroline Marie Elisabeth Daum/Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf/Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Characters: Caroline Marie Elisabeth Daum, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Ludolf von Katte, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Additional Tags: Complicated Relationships, Character Study, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Male-Female Friendship, Yuletide Treat, Backstory, Unspecified Fandom - Freeform
Summary:

How Caroline Daum ended up marrying Frederick the Great's lover: or, how to find yourself a suitable match in Frederician Prussia.

So instead of requesting 18th CE RPF this year, I requested fic for the 18th CE RPF German novel Sieben Jahre which is all about, well, Frederick the Great and his brother Henry/Heinrich (my problematic fave!) and their entire super dysfunctional family, and all the fascinating people around them!! Caroline Fredersdorf shows up very briefly but is awesome and memorable, and one of my prompts was for her backstory -- and I got this great story, both tender and hilarious, about how she ended up getting married to the King's chamberlain and lover Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf! It doesn't require any book knowledge, although knowing enough of the 18th CE history to know that Fredersdorf was, in fact, Fritz's chamberlain and lover is probably useful :)

I also got two (!!) Tiptree stories! (!!) James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) is one of those writers who had a fundamental effect on me as a young SF-reading adolescent. Yuletide rules allowed nominating anthologies this year, so I jumped on that because I love all these stories so much. And I adore how both of these stories interrogate the original stories' assumptions and open up new ways of looking at them!

That the Deity Who Kills for Pleasure Will Also Heal (6260 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (anthology) - James Tiptree Jr., On The Last Afternoon - James Tiptree Jr.
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Rape, Explicit Sexual Content, Ecocide, Agoraphobia, Background Human Sacrifice, Background Harm to Mice, Penis Fencing, Perhaps Something Will Be Saved From the Wreckage, Post-Canon
Summary:

Mysas says you’re gods from the sky, like the elders warned us. I think you’re just people. Gods wouldn’t look so frightened all the time, or sweat so much...

Ten thousand afternoons later, space travelers make contact again.

Post-canon for "On the Last Afternoon," dealing with what it means to be human; and the battle between humans and the ecosystem, and where does one draw the line? This can be read without knowing canon (it takes place generations after canon, in fact), although it's definitely very much in dialogue with the very different mindset of that story. (Sorry, I can't find an online version of the canon story.)

Remembering the Director of the Seventh Recitation: Oral Histories from the Imperial Archive (3597 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (anthology) - James Tiptree Jr., The Women Men Don't See - James Tiptree Jr., The Last Flight of Dr. Ain - James Tiptree Jr.
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Ruth Parsons
Additional Tags: Oral History, Post-Canon, "Main Character Death" Just In the Sense That Everyone Dies Eventually, Background Ruth Parsons & Althea Parsons, Vietnam War, Lunar Forestry
Summary:

Five memories of Ruth Parsons, afterwards.

Post-canon for "The Women Men Don't See," with some worldbuilding taken from "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain." Just a really interesting set of interviews with a diverse set of aliens and humans and fascinating worldbuilding, about a potential future for Ruth Parsons and her life, that has a lot of thoughts about axes other than the women/men axis. Just really great. This can definitely be read without knowing "Flight," and while helpful to know "Women," it's not necessary, I think, to enjoy it. (The canon story is archived here, although the formatting is a little weird.)

Oh hey it's December now, which means I should get presents for D's nieces. (D's nephews have now all graduated high school, and so they either get gift cards or we might try to figure out a family gift.) Which means I am asking you for help! Nieces are senior in high school and freshman in high school. The freshman isn't as much of a reader. The senior loves to read, so finding something good for her is more important. Senior!Niece also loves fantasy.

Last time I asked for recs, years ago, someone recommended Tiffany Aching, which the nieces were too young for at the time, but now may be the time (if I haven't passed it already). I just started Wee Free Men and am enjoying it a lot so far, and that may be part of the present. (I guess Tiffany is 9? so maybe technically too young for Senior!niece? But the book does read to me as more of a high-school reading level than a 9-year-old reading level.)

Other things: D's sister and brother-in-law are extremely devout and conservatively evangelical Christians and don't read fantasy at all (though they have come to accept their kid reading it). I don't think I could give her anything at this time that, say, has explicit sex scenes, or a gay or trans main character, and I'd also be a bit wary of too much violence/horror-themes. So, for example, Some Desperate Glory, which I already gave to D's nephews, is out.

Extra points for subtext of "here's how you grow up" and "here's how you deal with a flawed parent." (My sense -- which could of course be mistaken -- is that D's sister is an incredible parent that anyone would be lucky to have, and brother-in-law is less so. I do not think that there's anything particularly bad going on (I'm sure I have at least my share of flaws as a parent too), just that I remember at that age books being a helpful way to work through figuring out independence and becoming a different person than my parents.)

Hilo: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth (and five sequels); Gina -- The Girl Who Broke the World (and two sequels)

Outstanding! (As Hilo would say.) I do not know how with two children I have hitherto been unaware of the Hilo graphic novels, but indeed I did not know about them at all until a friend who was cleaning out her older kids' book collection offered them to A., and then I forgot about them until A. told me I needed to read them.

I don't know, y'all, these are graphic novels aimed towards the Dog Man demographic, I guess 8-year-old kids or so? they are definitely written on an 8-year-old level (complete with the old "let's erase everyone's memory" trick used a couple of times)... and somehow they were also a shot straight at my id. Maybe it's that I was getting over a cold when I read them and so my mental state was that of an 8-year-old. Or that the author was apparently influenced by Calvin and Hobbes and that went into some deep places in my brain. But I plowed through all 6 of the first set of books, and 3 of the next set, without being very aware that I was not absolutely the target audience. And indeed, what it shares so poignantly with C&H is that sense of deep joy. Hilo's very being just emanates joy. He has other kinds of emotions, too, but joy is the one that just radiates from the page.

But also all the characters are The Best and I have a lot of feelings about them! DJ and his large family that is so busy that they don't sit down to eat, but always have room for a few more, why not? Lisa, my fave, the little sister who starts getting suspicious about all the suspicious things going on that the other family members are too busy to pay attention to! Gina who wants to do STEM-y things and not do cheerleading, and her cheerleading-crazy family! Hilo and the ones who make up Hilo's backstory! Polly, who shows up in the second book and basically steals every scene!

The other thing about these books is that they are so wildly inventive. I read book one and thought, wow, that was good, but there's no way the author can pull that off for more than one book. Nope, he pulls it off for the five more in the series. It reminded me a little of how in The Good Place, I thought I knew what was coming in the second season, and then everything I thought was going to happen in the entire season happened in one episode. Loved these books madly, loved all the crazy hijinks madly, loved the deep compassion for all the characters madly.

The Gina books slow down a bit; they are still wildly inventive and with the same awesome characters, but by the nature of the series they have to be a tiny bit more serious, and so the set doesn't have quite the same exuberance that made me love the first six Hilo books so very much (which also do get more serious as they go along, but since it's all part of the same arc it's a little more gradual). But they are still great.

Spoilers

IZZY. Izzy was absolutely my favorite, no one will be surprised to hear. ALL THE PIECES FIT. I legit cried over her.

It's interesting -- some books I have a lot to say about, and I don't have very much to say about these; they're not the kind of books that I feel the need to chew over. (And, I mean. They're written for 8-year-olds.) They're just so joyous that I loved them very much.

HAZZAH!

3+/5. As this book starts, Sciona Freynan, an extremely talented and driven mage who cares about magic and really nothing else, is going to take the exams to become a Highmage, one of the few elite magicians who is responsible for powering the magic city of Tiran. She's the only girl of her generation to even be asked to take the tests, because she lives in a deeply sexist society, which she knows and hates. Fortunately, she also knows she can ace the exams. However, the sexism of the other mages means that, even as a Highmage, she gets a janitor as a lab assistant, Thomil, who is from an immigrant group called the Kwen that are refugees from a magical Blight that has killed their lands and people; the Kwen are widely regarded to be subhuman. (That is to say, this society is deeply racist as well as deeply sexist!)

I was first recced this book during a conversation I had with someone in RL who said that she felt that Some Desperate Glory was kind of your run-of-the-mill YA dystopia and recommended this one instead. I also read rachelmanija's take on it, which was a helpful counterpoint to my RL convo. I ended up feeling about it maybe in the middle of the two reactions? I did end up liking it, but I also... thought it was much, much more of your run-of-the-mill YA dystopia than SDG.

Now... I have read a fair amount of YA dystopia for various reasons, and some of it can get incredibly and eye-rollingly anvilicious, where the heroine (it's always a heroine) talks like tumblr posts and the villains kick puppies for fun. This was actually in some sense not that way on the surface, in the sense that Sciona is herself reasonably realistically racist, and there is at least one of the Highmages who is presented as a reasonably nice and not-as-sexist person. However, by the end there is a sufficient divide between the Kwen (who are basically perfect) and Sciona (who is flawed) and pretty much everyone else (super racist) that I was feeling somewhat anvil-icized, even though at the same time I do think that it was much better on this front than the average YA dystopia.

There is a plot twist in the middle which I did not guess (although I did feel rather like I should have, and perhaps would have if I'd really sat down and thought about it) and which I greatly enjoyed. I suspect that one's enjoyment of this book may be predicated on whether one guesses it or not. That part was pretty great, but then I felt that much of the second half of the book was sort of a slog as Sciona then figures out what to do about the plot twist, but it got better once she had her plan in hand. I also did not guess her plan / the ending. I did not think that the book would go there, but it did and I admired it for having the courage of its convictions, and I admired the depiction of Sciona for being extremely consistent all through. I respect that Wang didn't try to make out like Sciona was better or more perfect than she actually was. Though the book, in my opinion, does suffer when compared to SDG, which doesn't just go for character consistency but for really hard change which takes an entire book to work through.

Spoilery thoughts

So yeah, I didn't guess that Sciona was going to burn the entire Magistry and government down! Literally! While she was herself poisoned!

But... it also seemed like maximum chaos for both Tiran and the Kwen, and a bunch of people, both Tiranish and Kwen, have already died and a lot more are probably gonna die, and it really isn't super clear that what is going to come out of all the chaos will be anything better than what was there before, except possibly it might be forced to be less dystopian because all the people running the dystopian technology have been destroyed. On the other hand, I did rather admire how Sciona's flaws of (a) not really caring about other humans and (b) not having any idea how other humans would react to things, because, well, see (a), were really consistent here.

And I loved how she does embrace all her flaws at the end: She had always belonged here with insatiable men, her brothers in greed and ego. Sciona's only distinction among these mages was that she was a more honest monster than any of them. Yeah, that's... pretty accurate! And like I said before, I respect that.

I must say I prefer books where the resolution at least makes stabs towards breaking the cycle of more and more violence, instead of accelerating the cycle (well, Thomil did make one effort towards that, which was nice; Sciona sure did not), but I do enjoy reading one of the latter every once in a while.

A couple of other spoilery issues I had:

- I totally did not buy that Sciona would have a different reaction to the plot twist (that all of their magic was causing the Blight) than every other Tiranish we see in the entire city (except maybe poor dumb Mordra, and it's not even entirely clear what his reaction is). I mean, to be fair, her negative reaction wasn't instant either (and that was well done), but she's grown up in Tiran her whole life, she's not devout but she's reasonably religious, she's been told her whole life that Kwen are inferior (and even says things to that effect), she just doesn't care about other people in general; it's not at all clear to me why she should be the one person to think differently than the others. The book explanation that no one else cares, I think, is that everyone else is horrible and racist, except I guess one offscreen guy who was so overcome that he committed suicide when he found out the truth before the book even started. Idk, I think there should have been more Tiranish who shared her reaction, or at least some who spanned more of a space of reactions. But I guess that would have been more complicated.

- What do people in Tiran eat? Aren't there, like, farms and things outside the city? Wouldn't the Blight affect those? Do they not trade with anyone? Use wood? It really seems to me that the ecological issues of the Blight would have a definite impact on Tiran by now.

I also thought the magic system was hilariously awesome. The mages use a typewriter -- they call it a spellograph -- to type up spells with very precise coordinates and variables (there's a great bit where Sciona is explaining to Thomil what a variable is, without using that exact term of course). So there are parts like this: She assigned the name POWER. Next, she wrote an action sub-spell called FIRE, inside which she assigned the carbon ball the name DEVICE. (I'm not even gonna get into the if and only if CONDITIONS of this spell, because it's quoted in rachelmanija's review.) I mean, yes, cool! I'm totally on board with algorithmic magic! Then I showed it to D and he was immediately like, "Wow, they use COBOL to do magic in this world!" (He does feel opposed to this on principle... mostly because it's COBOL.)