The only real development today: got my seasonal flu and Covid shots, both in the same arm, so I will be able to sleep on my side tonight but tomorrow will be fun. Back to the book. Whee!
Month: September 2026
35%
Only eight hundred or so pages to go, guys!
In which my son is a savage
My son is fifteen, and a freshman in high school. He spent his early years at a small private school, and transitioned to a much larger public high school this year. As such, he’s encountering several aspects of the human existence that he was more or less sheltered from prior to this year. As neither my wife nor I particularly care to fight with him about anything growing from his body, he has a scraggly teenage semi-beard and an absolutely glorious mane of blond hair that reaches the middle of his back.
We have warned him that, given his appearance, it is absolutely inevitable that someone will eventually attempt to buy weed from him. It’s ridiculous to deny it; if I picked him and 20 other white kids from his class and asked a cop which one of these kids is holding? mine would be the first he turned to. He doesn’t dress like a stoner, necessarily, but the rest of the look is there.
Today he went into the bathroom and two kids were passing a vape back and forth. They left when he came in, he took care of business, and then another student came in. That student came in and, no doubt detecting a whiff of the vape on the air, asked him if he wanted to buy “a smoke.” I assume that’s a cigarette; I don’t know if kids call vapes “smokes,” but whatever.
My son’s response? “No thanks. My parents love me.”
My wife and I both reacted in the same way to this story, which was that he was probably lucky he didn’t get popped for it, but he said the kid was chill about it. I did let him know that a simple “no thanks” would probably suffice next time.
Well, that was no fun
In accordance with prophecy, the parents of Little Billy Who Only Just Wanted To Play Football were already in the office when I got to work this morning. LB did not play last night, but as his grades are now fixed he can play the last two games of the season … which is exactly what would have happened had they pulled none of their bullshit at all. IEP talk was shut down quickly and forcefully by the head of the special education department, who pointed out that a student failing a class is not, in fact, automatically a violation of an IEP. Oops!
And then I missed half my lunch and had to write my first three referrals of the year, none of which were for my own students or even my own grade level, and all three of which resulted in suspensions. I still haven’t written any for my own kids. I may very well make it through the first quarter. There’s only three weeks left!
That said, it left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I came home and killed yokai for a few hours, and now that it’s 8:00, and since the book I’m reading has nearly 1300 pages … well, it’s Kindle time in the Siler household. Because my wrists aren’t strong enough to hold a 1300-page book for very long. This is clearly what ebooks were made for.
I wish you would
I wish I thought I could get away with posting work emails in full, because hoo-boy, did I have a doozy of a banger of an email thread waiting for me when I woke up this morning– waiting for me in the morning, because it was sent at 12:30 last night. A parent emailed thirteen different people because her darling sweetheart wasn’t eligible to play middle school football any longer, on account of his failing three of his seven classes, including mine. Has he been failing three classes for weeks? Of course he has. Do teachers have a way to see if parents have been checking their kids’ grades? Of course we do. Have they? Of course they haven’t.
This decision was “potentially affecting his future.” He is five foot two and 110 pounds, dripping wet. He will not even make the high school team, much less anything beyond that.
Now, as it turns out, I had him retake a test last week, which he didn’t finish. Had I been at work yesterday, I’d have had him finish it then; I was planning on him finishing it this morning, which he did, and which brought his grade up to passing. I want this perfectly clear: I was going to do this anyway, even if the email had never been sent. That didn’t stop the thread from continuing to escalate throughout the day, as she apparently thought that everyone involved up and down the command structure was just going to drop everything to make sure that little Billy got his ten minutes of playing time tonight. At least two of his teachers do not have prep periods and one has been out for the last two days; needless to say, nobody is making replying to hysterical FAFO emails their highest priorities. Also, literally none of us have a single drop of influence over whether he plays football or not, and I suspect none of us care.
Then Dad, who no one has ever heard from all year, got involved, and Dad decided to cc in the superintendent, who I can absolutely assure you neither has the time nor the inclination to give a single damn about whether a kid with three failing grades played football tonight. Mom’s email was, in its own way, reasonable; Dad’s very much was not, and trust me, sir, only showing up to gripe about playing time in football is not endearing you to any of us. Two of my kids ended up in the hospital after the last 8th grade football game, one concussed so bad that he hasn’t been back to school yet after a week. As far as I’m concerned the entire fucking sport should be banned.
The worst thing? Dad’s a teacher in our district. Which means that he knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he’s full of shit, and that no one is trembling at the thought of the superintendent stepping in. By the end of the entire mess Mom was hyperventilating about the kid’s IEP, which, needless to say, does not mention sports eligibility on any of its nineteen pages and also does not contain any particular restrictions on the grades we have to give work that is not turned in. Does he have extra time to get his work done and turn it in? Yes! But he still has to turn it in before that matters, and … well.
The last email was a “demand” that she receive a “clear and written explanation” about whether her son could or could not play in tonight’s football game and why. If she received any such thing, I was not included in the response; I look forward to seeing her in the office already as I walk in in the morning. Because I’m not even failing him anymore and I am genuinely looking forward to this conversation. Of the three of us, me and his sports-obsessed idiot parents, who do you think has actually read the lad’s IEP?
Tomorrow’s gonna be awesome.
Four quick book reviews
I read books, did you know that? Let’s talk about a few of them real quick:
A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.
“A bold and biting satire, Yesteryear…will have you cackling and gasping right to the final page.”
—Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid series
I already own a book called Trad Wife, and I realized the other day that there is another book called Trad Wife coming out soon, and I sort of feel like I should buy that too so that I can put them next to each other on the shelf. Simple things please me, I suppose.
Read those. Don’t read this. It’s one of the worst books I’ve finished this year. It’s not a “satire” so much as a book about an asshole, the twist at the end is mind-blowingly bad, and it squanders every bit of goodwill the premise– which is genuinely interesting– might engender in the reader. Everyone in it sucks.
“One of 2026’s literary triumphs.”—Boston Globe
From the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungocomes a vivid, moving novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires.
Spoiler alert! Everyone is gay. Everyone is gay. And no one will admit to anyone else that they’re gay, except everyone kinda knows that the gay people are gay, and if anything this is a better satire of repressive religious environments than Yesteryear was, and this book isn’t a satire either. I enjoyed this one, although the fact that the main character is John-Calum and his father is John (thus the “John of John”) led to me getting embarrassingly far into the book before I realized that Old John was getting some POV bits here and there and the author wasn’t just randomly swapping between calling his main character John and calling him Cal. You can absolutely blame me for that but I will feebly point out in my own defense that had their characters on the page been more distinct I wouldn’t have been able to make such a dumb mistake. POV John and Cal’s Dad John from Cal’s Perspective are very different characters, let’s leave it at that.
I still don’t know what literature is, but this was enjoyable, and I look forward to Shuggie Bain, currently on my Unread Shelf.
Stephen’s god died on the longest day of the year…
Three years later, Stephen is a broken paladin, living only for the chance to be useful before he dies. But all that changes when he encounters a fugitive named Grace in an alley and witnesses an assassination attempt gone wrong. Now the pair must navigate a web of treachery, beset on all sides by spies and poisoners, while a cryptic killer stalks one step behind…
From the Hugo and Nebula Award winning author of Swordheart and The Twisted Ones comes a saga of murder, magic, and love on the far side of despair.
Okay, granted, the phrase “love on the far side of despair” is right there, but just be aware before you get into this that it’s a romance. No, it’s not a romantasy, it came out in 2021 before that word existed, but I wasn’t aware of what I was getting into when I picked this up. That sounds like a criticism; it’s really not. I don’t mind romance, and I don’t mind romantasy, either, a lot of the time, but I really feel like the cover and the copy lead you to expect a certain kind of book that you will get tantalizing glimpses of here and there but is not this book. That said, I’ve already ordered the rest of the series, and I may reevaluate the first book once I’ve read the rest of them. I don’t remember being a huge fan of The Twisted Ones, which is the only other T. Kingfisher book I’ve read, but she’s got about a thousand books so there’s a lot to dig into with this author.
New York Times bestselling author Shannon Chakraborty sets sail into the second adventure of pirate Amina al-Sirafi as her quest to track down magical artifacts brings her to the island lair of a sorceress whose woven enchantments are impossible to flee.
I loved the first Amina al-Sirafi book, which was my fourth-favorite book of 2024, and this was every bit as good as the first book, with an intensely creepy villain and a great, twisty mystery to unravel. I have a weakness for pirates and Arabian-themed fantasy, and, well, again, judge this book by the cover, which features a shipwreck and a griffon. I can read books about this character forever, and I want at least twelveteen more of them. Seven thumbs up.
Nothing tonight either
This has obviously been the best weekend ever, as I’ve spent the entire day in bed and have been in the bathroom every 45 minutes to an hour, all day, since about 7:30 this morning. I’ve already called in sick tomorrow. I have a job where I can’t get to the bathroom without someone else covering my class and even if I wake up feeling better I can’t risk it.
Whee.
Nothing tonight
Woke up at 6:00 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, and the day has been spent with finishing a book and taking naps, some intentional, some not. A book review or two tomorrow, maybe.