#REVIEW: The Poet Empress, by Shen Tao

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Bear with me, if you will: before I review this book, I have to review this book. As in, the object made of paper and cardboard that can be held in your hands. I have amassed a lot of special editions and Special Editions over the last couple of years— I have an entire bookshelf where the books are arranged spine-in so that the pretty painted edges are visible, and yes, I can still tell you what damn near all of them are anyway.

I have two copies of Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress. One of them is a book-box special edition from Illumicrate. The other is, supposedly, the regular edition, the one you’ll get from Amazon or if you walk into a brick and mortar bookstore.

The regular edition may very well be the prettiest book I own.

If you love books at all as art objects in and of themselves, go grab this book right now before this printing sells out, because I doubt future editions are going to look like this first one. Don’t read another word; the story doesn’t matter, this book is that pretty and you want to own it so you can look at it. I am going to have to figure out a way to display this one front-facing. The endpapers are gorgeous, the edges are gilded beautifully, and the cover has this lovely sparkly texture on it that I can neither take nor find a decent picture of. It just doesn’t come through properly in photographs. Go buy this book, right now.

Oh, you want to read it? Yeah, you should do that too, because I know it’s only mid-February and things change but right now I feel like this is going to be high in the running for my favorite book of the year. I think the last time I was this impressed by a debut novel was Jade City. Which I think wasn’t actually Fonda Lee’s debut, but it was the first of her books I read. Close enough. It’s matching my enthusiasm for To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which … I also compared to Jade City. Along with Scarlet Odyssey. And Iron Widow, so maybe I’m overusing this particular comparison, but the point is I really loved all of those books. This is up there with them.

It’s totally prettier than all of them, though.

Anyway, the story: the main character, Wei Yin, is a peasant girl living in the backwoods of a famine-ridden, crumbling empire controlled by the Azalea Dynasty. The empire is, more or less, Not China; roll with it. The emperor is dying, and has chosen his second son, Prince Terren, as his successor, and Prince Terren is seeking a bride. He has sent emissaries all over the country seeking out women who wish to compete for the honor of marrying him. Wei Yin manages to get herself selected, in hope that she will be able to marry the prince and use her influence to save her family and her village from the famine. Prince Terren, unfortunately, quickly turns out to be a horrible bastard.

Now, I’m gonna be honest: at first glance this doesn’t sound great. Does the phrase “enemies-to-lovers romantasy” mean anything to you? Because even the marketing for this book has been leaning into this, and you are just going to have to trust me that this book absolutely is not a romantasy and is far too intricate for such nonsense as “tropes.” Terren and Wei Yin are both impressively complex, layered characters, and … well, I’m not spoiling anything, but this is absolutely not an enemies-to-lovers book. Why is the book called The Poet Empress? Because much of this world’s magic is based on poetry, and when Wei Yin decides that her best bet is to murder Prince Terren, she realizes that the only way she’s going to be able to do it is to write a very particular kind of poem, one that requires her to know and understand the target on an immensely intimate level.

Oh, it’s illegal for women to be able to read, by the way. Which sorta complicates things.

I know, I know, some of you are shaking your heads. Of course she’s going to marry the prince. The damn book is called The Poet Empress, not The Peasant Girl Who Came In Twenty-Third and Got Her Head Chopped Off. I promise you no other aspect of this book is going to be predictable, and the “competition” is dispensed with much more quickly than you think it’s going to. And once that happens the book can get on with its actual goal, which is sinking its claws into you and slowly tearing your heart out. You will be fifteen pages from the end of the book and you will still not know how it’s going to turn out.

It’s also dark as hell, so be prepared for that; Terren is terrible, and Wei Yin is put through some absolutely terrible things as a result of being connected to him, much less actually married to him. On top of that, many of the women who didn’t win the competition are fairly powerful and well-connected in their own rights, and a number of them immediately decide to kill her. And then there’s the dowager empress, who is also unhappy with her son’s choice of bride. And the prince who got passed over in favor of his younger brother. Comparatively, dying of famine in a squalid village almost feels quaint.

This is brilliant fucking work, guys, and I cannot wait for more from Shen Tao. Go get this book right now. Even if you just look at it, it’s worth the money. The fact that there’s an amazing story in there is a bonus.

700

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

A quick spot of extra blogwanking before I make it the second day in a row with two posts: yesterday topped out at 22,638 pageviews and 13,898 visitors, meaning that it was my highest-traffic day by about ten thousand views, which is insane. As of 6:08 PM today, we’re at a comparatively sedate 5,043 pageviews, still probably a top-20 day if not better than that.

Also, today marks seven hundred days in a row of posting to this site. I’m not going to pretend every post has been stellar, but I haven’t missed a day in nearly two years.

Who wants to touch me?

Today’s blogwanking WTF moment

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

Why, yes, I’m writing two posts back-to-back.

Today is, by a wide margin, the highest-traffic day in the history of the blog. Even when In which I tell you how your religion works was blowing up on its way to amassing over 100,000 views, the biggest single day was 12K. To get an idea of how ridiculous those numbers are, I had more pageviews today than all but three months in the twelve and a half years I’ve been writing here. We aren’t halfway through February just yet and it’s the third-highest traffic month in that entire time. February is on pace to beat entire years.

Nearly all of those views (around 17K) are from the US. Another thousand from Australia. None from China, which is where I was getting a lot of my traffic during the last few months of 2025. And they’re spread out— look at the difference between uniques and pageviews. In which the kids are fine, shut up has about 1500 views. How your religion works is adding another 750. The rest of the hits are all over the place.

Three likes and zero comments.

I feel like I ought to be elated— who doesn’t enjoy it when their writing is getting noticed?— but the absence of any clear reason for the spike has me suspecting bots, even though I don’t have any real idea how that would be happening either. Very few referrals are showing up. Google’s telling me I have 378 active users right now, and I’m watching that number climb as I’m typing. I have no idea what’s going on.

If you’re new around here, please let me know what brought you to the site. I mean, I appreciate it, but the curiosity is killing me. I’ve had 400 hits while I’ve been typing this and the active users number is up to 482 now:

Send me some money, damn it. 🙂

#REVIEW: Operation Bounce House, by Matt Dinniman

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

In a word: skippable.

I’m genuinely tempted to make that the entire review, to be honest. This is the ninth Matt Dinniman book I’ve read, and the tenth is going to be out in March, and of the nine I’ve loved seven of them, thought the eighth (Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon) was okay, and … then there was this. I forced myself to buckle down and finish it over the course of last night and today, and to be honest I could have put it away after a hundred pages and been fine with it. It really feels like a manuscript that he had lying around and the publishing house was desperate to put something out that was trad-pubbed from the beginning, so he gave them this.

I don’t want to spend a ton of time shitting on this book, especially since it isn’t going to affect my enthusiasm for Dungeon Crawler Carl, but skippable is probably the perfect single-word review, and if I were to write a two-word review it would be half-baked. Nothing about it is particularly well thought-out, the main character is entirely indistinguishable from Carl, including his uncanny ability to come up with complicated plans on the fly, and I defy you to explain to me why the book (or the in-universe show the book is named after) is called Operation Bounce House. Everyone talks like they’re a teenager in 2020 even though the book is set hundreds of years in the future and on a planet Earth has colonized. I cannot emphasize enough how there has been no cultural change of any kind during all this time. I spent the whole book waiting for a twist where it turned out they had been on Earth the whole time and not actually in the future.

The plot: Oliver, who is Carl, is a farmer on a colony planet. The planet gets attacked by mechs being remotely piloted by, mostly, bored and wealthy teenagers on Earth who have spent lots of money to be part of a game show and may or may not realize they’re killing actual people. There’s lots of talk about how the showrunners are portraying everyone on the planet as terrorists. They fight back.

Why does this game show exist? Why are they killing people? No reason, really. Dungeon Crawler Carl earns a certain amount of “don’t think about it too hard.” This book very much does not. Nothing feels like it has been thought through.

It is not a LitRPG, by the way, even though the attackers are technically playing a game. There are no statistics or leveling up or unlocking abilities or anything of that sort; it’s more of a military sci-fi than anything else.

I have read worse books, to be sure— hell, I have read worse books in 2026— but I have no real reason to recommend that anyone else pick this up. Read Dungeon Crawler Carl, definitely. Ignore this one.

I want my brain back

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, video gamesLeave a comment

I have believed myself to be entirely neurotypical for my entire life, other than, y’know, the anxiety disorder and occasional crippling depression, so … yeah, maybe this wasn’t the right sentence to start with? But I’ve definitely never thought I had ADHD before. Until this week. My god. It has been a nightmare week in a lot of ways, some of which I’ve talked about and some of which I haven’t, so maybe I’ve earned it, but … ugh. I read nearly 9,000 pages in January according to Storygraph. I don’t think I’ve managed 200 this week. I can’t focus. It’s driving me batshit.

Now, a good chunk of that is Nioh 3, I’m not gonna lie; I’ve put 24 hours into it already since it came out. I knew it was going to eat my life, and eat my life it has. The other thing, though? Have you heard of Redactle? It’s the worst fucking thing ever. Imagine a Wikipedia article, with all the words except maybe the 15 most common English words blanked out. Selected at random. And then the game is you guess words until you get the title of the article. Which might be, like, “Jesus,” or something you’re familiar with, and might be Niamey, the capital city of Niger, or maybe it’ll be Navier-Stokes Equations, which you will somehow solve in 178 words? “Adivasi,” by comparison, took 401.

It’s not … fun, so much as addictive and horrible? But I haven’t done one yet today and I will before I go to bed. Right after I beat this boss. And then maybe I’ll get some sleep before I pick my wife up at the train station tomorrow morning, and hopefully my life more or less returns to normal.

(Thirteen minutes and 235 words for today’s puzzle, btw.)

I suppose it was inevitable

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

The boy wasn’t feeling well today, so we both got to stay home since my wife is out of town until Friday morning(*), and … blech. I tend to spend all day gaslighting myself when I’m home because I’m sick, and when I am absolutely not sick at all and home anyway the feeling is powerful indeed. Like, I’m union; I get family sick days and frankly no one gets to challenge me on my sick days one way or another anyway. But I’ve spent all day being twitchy and nervous for no goddamn reason at all.

I, uh, don’t really have anything other than that. Today didn’t suck nearly as hard as the rest of the week has but that’s not exactly a difficult bar to clear. Hopefully I can get through tomorrow without any illnesses, car accidents or people getting shot. We’ll see.

(*) Because my schedule means I leave before he gets out of bed, and because my wife has a job where she can work from home effectively any time she wants at the drop of a hat, she is nearly always the one who stays home. Not because hurr durr sick kid is Mom’s job.

Still too much

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching1 Comment

Something fun about civil disobedience in middle schools: they don’t … quite get it? They decided they were going to walk out of the building during advisory today, and that the actual protest itself would take place during advisory and fifth hour, with everyone returning to class afterward and the rest of the day proceeding as normal. Consequences: an unexcused absence for those two classes for all students who protested. As we all know, two class periods of unexcused absence actually prevent you from going to college, so there was a lot at stake here.

Well, first, a lot of them didn’t quite get that since this was a protest and they were breaking rules, there wasn’t going to be, like, an announcement over the PA system that it was time to go outside and be civilly disobedient. I had kids actually asking me if they needed to check in with me in Advisory before going to the protest. No! And when there were a ton of them just sort of lurking nervously in the hallways after the tardy bell had rung, I put my teacher voice on and told a mess of them to make a decision and either go outside or head to Advisory.

To which the response was, I shit you not, “We can just … go?” Yes! That’s kind of the whole idea. You just go, whether the teachers want you to or not. It isn’t called civil obedience.

(I am quite proud of three of my Algebra kids, who took on a leadership role and were the literal first three kids out of the building. That takes more bravery than you might think at this level, especially from kids who are generally predisposed to following rules.)

I also was correct in predicting that our administration, who were all outside monitoring and more or less keeping everyone in the parking lot, would be fielding requests for permission to go to the bathroom. Also kind of hilarious. I’ll walk out of class, sure, but go to the bathroom without permission? Madness! Chaos!

Go ahead, ask me how many of them didn’t get their coats before going outside, since generally they’re not supposed to have coats on during the day.

The decision was made and swiftly communicated that none of us were to bar or prohibit the kids from leaving our rooms if they chose to do so, but that they would not be allowed to go back and forth from outside to inside, and if they came inside, either because they needed to pee or they were cold, they were to return to class. Again, given the ages of our kids, I don’t find that unreasonable.

My kids all had a math test today (and I swear I didn’t schedule it to be a dick about the protest) and the ones who stayed behind– a little less than half of the class– still had to take the test.(*) I wrote the answers on the board. Left them there for two minutes and then erased them. One of them still got answers wrong.

Anyway, then the cops showed up. I think— keep in mind that I wasn’t out there, so this is all secondhand, and may contain inaccuracies– that the intent was at least mostly benevolent. They weren’t there to arrest anybody or cause any trouble and they didn’t bring, like, any crowd control shit with them. I’m pretty sure our regular SRO was part of the group.

The only thing is, two days ago a student’s older brother was murdered by the local police. Another former student, now a 9th grader, was shot not far from school by a still-unidentified assailant and is currently still hospitalized. My understanding is he’s stable but that word can mean a lot of different things.

Our kids are, to put it charitably, not in the mood for the police at the moment. And from what I’ve heard, it got kind of ugly quickly, as some unclear percentage of our students shifted from anti-ICE to ACAB. There may have been some snowball-throwing as well; I’m not clear about that. It was brought under control quickly– I’m not sure how much of that was the administration and how much of it was the kids realizing that they needed to rein each other in– but that could have gotten really bad really fast. My biggest worry was that ICE was actually going to show up; luckily, the worst-case scenario did not take place, for once.

All of this is just today’s work nonsense, by the way; there was home nonsense and family nonsense as well, but I’m not in the mood to get into that right now.

I kind of need tomorrow to go well.

(*) a lot of whom indicated to me that they wanted to be outside but their parents had forbidden them to. In fact, one girl’s father works in the building, and he called me to make sure she was in class. I think I would probably have lied to him if she hadn’t been, tbh.

This is too goddamn much

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

In the last 24 hours there have been two teenagers shot, one killed, in two separate incidents in the town I teach in. One has a direct connection to my school; the other has not been identified yet.

I can’t tonight. Sorry.