A secret about me: my opinions cannot always be trusted.
I was wandering through old posts the other day, as I am occasionally known to do, and I came across a post where I described Pearl Jam’s last album, Gigaton, as “forgettable” and had very high praise for Binaural, an album that I just said was possibly my least favorite of their albums. So … sometimes my opinions change! This is a thing that happens. In Gigaton’s case I am much more fond of it than I was when it first came out (this has been known to be a thing with their work, I’ll admit it) and while I don’t have anything bad to say about Binaural I was apparently really in the mood for it when I wrote that other paragraph.
So if you want to take me saying that Dark Matter is Pearl Jam’s best album since Vitalogy with a bit of salt, I will not look askance upon you. I will say this: the last time I remember being this floored by an album, the last time it ran through my head constantly for two weeks, the last time I listened to nearly nothing else (other than a few Taylor Swift spins, mostly under duress) for this length of time since it came out, was the Dave Matthews Band’s Crash in 1996.
I will have this entire album memorized soon. I don’t think there’s a single weak track. There’s one song, Something Special, where you could make an argument that it belongs more on an Eddie Vedder solo album than a Pearl Jam album, and one song has a bridge that I feel like sounds like a transition into another one of their songs, but that’s all the criticism I can muster.
It’s amazing. It’s their best work in, literally, two decades. I cannot wait to hear it live, and if you have ever been a Pearl Jam fan you owe it to yourself to pick this up. I’d go through song by song, but somehow I have another hockey game to go to in a few minutes, so this is the best I can do for now. If I’ve still got it on 24/7 rotation in another week or so I’ll go ahead and do that. For now, Scared of Fear, Wreckage, Won’t Tell and Waiting for Stevie are my favorite tracks, but again: there are no skips here. I love it I love it I love it.
I could make this post a lot more complicated and detailed if I wanted to, I suppose. I have had a lot of thoughts about Taylor Swift over the years, and I am fully aware that Ms. Swift has no reason to care in even a hypothetical sense about what I think. She’s a billionaire and she’s more talented and influential than I will ever be at anything and I’m not the target audience for this anyway. I have had many, many opinions about her over the years; I still never really thought disappointment was going to be one of them. One of her greatest talents is how incredibly ear wormy her music is. I don’t care if you’re a Taylor Swift fan or not; you have five of her songs memorized. You may not even know you have five Taylor Swift songs memorized, but you do.
I have listened to this album at least four or five times by now, and I could name a couple of individual lyrics over its 31 tracks, but none because I thought they were clever or impressive. I was psyched about her doing a duet with Post Malone; he’s wasted. There are people mad at her about a line about living in the 1830s that is utterly a nothingburger and is out of context besides. There’s another line in another song that I thought was memorable until I realized that Justin Bieber of all fucking people had already written it. There’s one song where she says fuck, like, sixty times, but I can’t remember the name.
Four listens and I can’t hum a single track and there’s nothing I can even start singing along to even if I was capable of matching the slow, breathy voice she’s using for every single song. The whole thing sounds incredibly samey and there’s little variation in tone or tempo or musicality anywhere.
Also: ma’am, you are in your mid-thirties and it is time to stop singing about high school.
I dunno. I genuinely loved Evermore and Folklore and Midnights was pretty OK with a few tracks I really liked. This one’s a dud for me musically, and lyrically it’s yet another Taylor Swift Has Ex-Boyfriends album after three in a row with very little of that type of content.
Yes, that’s right, three book reviews in three days, although this one is going to be shorter. Rin Chupeco is kind of a known quantity around here; this is the … sixth? of their books that I’ve read, and I’ve enjoyed all of them and at least one or two have made my end-of-year list. And, honestly, Silver Under Nightfall sat on my unread shelf for long enough that by the time I picked it up to read it I’d forgotten what the hell it was about.
And, honestly, I may never have known what it was about– it’s possible that I just ordered the damn thing on reflex because of 1) that cover (my god, that cover) and 2) Rin Chupeco. Again, known quantity. I buy Rin Chupeco books. It’s a thing I do.
It’s, uh, about vampires? And a bisexual vampire hunter who falls in love with both members of an engaged outwardly-cishet vampire couple? And there is so, so much sex that I promise you is nowhere to be found in the Bible, and that’s three super queer books in a row now. And I’m sorry, but “vampire hunter who falls in love with some vampires” should absolutely have led to me putting this book down, never looking at it again, and quietly looking down on anyone who said good things about it. I’m tired of vampires. I’m tired of vampire books. I’m definitely tired of vampire books where the vampires are irresistible and fuck everything. At least there are no werewolves, I suppose? Yet?
Finished the fucker in a day. Reflected on just how different Chupeco’s writing style is in this book compared to everything else they’ve written. Looked up the sequel. Got mad that the sequel wasn’t available in paperback yet, since my copy of Silver is in paperback. Spent ninety fucking dollars on the absolutely fucking breathtaking Illumicrate editions, which will probably take so long to get here that the paperback will be out by then anyway.
This is going to be One of Those Reviews, I think. I am beginning this review at 7:30 PM on Saturday, which, you will notice, was yesterday. You may have noticed that yesterday-which-for-me-is-still-today’s post is also a book review.
I am writing the second book review of the day because I woke up this morning, read the last two hundred pages of To Cage a God, wrote a review, ate lunch, took a shower, and then read The Sins on Their Bones fucking cover-to-cover in what wasn’t quite a literal single sitting but may as well have been. The eArc I read was four hundred and eighteen pages. I read the entire book in roughly six hours, less if you deduct a couple of pee breaks, some light web surfing and doom scrolling, and a few pieces of frozen pizza for dinner.
The real miracle? I don’t have a physical copy of this book. I’ve read plenty of books in a single sitting before. I don’t think I’ve ever done that with an ebook. Like, literally never. This is the first time.
I also paused to order the book from Amazon, because I got sent this by a publicist in return for a review, and I don’t actually have a physical copy. It comes out May 7th.
You may be wondering what I meant by “one of those reviews” in the first paragraph, there. Here’s the thing: This book started out as an uh-oh, developed into something I was grudgingly respecting, and then moved into fuck it, five stars territory by ending very well. I’ll get into what it’s actually about in a few minutes but it’s very much the type of book that if I talk about too much you’ll think I hated it. I did not! I liked it a lot. But all of the interesting things I have to say about it are gonna feel like gripes. I’m annoying that way sometimes.
But let’s talk about To Cage a God for a second more, because, completely by accident, this book echoes that one quite a lot. Both are set in a proto-Russian setting, with roughly eighteenth- or nineteenth-century technology (guns are mentioned in Bones, but don’t really belong on the cover) and both are mostly about a plot to remove an unjust ruler. Both have substantial gay representation; both have magic, although we’ll get to talking about Sins on their Bones’ magic in a bit. The good guys even get into the bad guys’ palace at the end with more or less the exact same deception, which is one bloody odd coincidence. For a while, I was genuinely concerned that reading both of them in one day was poisoning my opinion of Bones, but as I said: once it heats up it heats up fast.
Let’s go back to the queer representation: I feel bad about complaining about this, but Sins on Their Bones might actually have too much, as I’m pretty sure that literally every character in the book with a speaking role is queer, including two tzars and the entire surviving court of the deposed one. One character gets to give a whole speech about being asexual. I did not notice any trans characters but the rest of the book is so gay that I genuinely think I probably missed an obvious clue somewhere; I refuse to believe everyone in this book is cisgendered. There’s a throwaway line at the end of the book about someone receiving a ton of marriage proposals from across the continent, implying that every other ruling family is super gay too. And there’s a point where someone has to convince a side character who has barely appeared in the book at all that they knew each other as kids, and he tells her that he remembers her first crush, which was on another girl, because of course it was.
And, like, the main character is the deposed tzar, who is married to the guy who deposed him, and he and his court are in hiding for most of the book. He’s very mopey about it. You’ve seen Monty Python’s Holy Grail, right? Remember the bit with the prince in the castle who just wanted to sing? Imagine that guy was the tzar of Russia, only instead of singing, he wanted to have sex with his husband. That’s the vibe for a lot of the book. He snaps out of it eventually, but he’s very sad for basically the whole first half. Also drunk. And the interactions between the main group of characters really don’t feel like an exiled potentate and his court. They’re more like a bunch of grad students in a polycule. At one point they go to a magic library– the magic library is probably my favorite part of the book and I would gleefully read an entire book about Aleksandr, the librarian, and his disembodied head coffee table, and no, I’m not explaining that. But they go to the magic library and they’re sitting in a room listening to the librarian talk and one character sits on another one’s lap. There’s a bit where they’re expositing at each other early in the book and three of them are basically lying in a cuddlelump on the floor.
I don’t know any kings and I definitely don’t know any tzars but I feel like typically the word “cuddlelump” doesn’t get applied to them often. And from now on whenever I think about Cabinet meetings I’m going to imagine Pete Buttigieg walking in and confidently sitting on Merrick Garland’s lap, and none of you can stop me.
Also, everybody’s Jewish, except they aren’t, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Now, Jewish mysticism and Jewish magic are a thing, and they are fascinating, and I have read several really goddamn good books that take inspiration from Kabbalah. The phrase “inspired by Jewish mysticism” was half of what got me to jump at the chance to read this early. But the word “Jewish” doesn’t show up anywhere in this book, and the place names are all clearly drawn from real places in Russia, and it’s not like it’s a pastiche on Judaism, these folks are Ashkenazi Jewish. They’re praying in Hebrew and wearing prayer shawls and the names of God play a big role and churches are called shuls and there are angels whose names are clearly only barely modified from their Biblical equivalents, and it’s so obviously Judaism that it’s really weird to me that the author didn’t just make them Jewish. There are literal Bible quotes scattered around, just without actual chapter and verse references. I mean, there wasn’t ever a Jewish tzar of Russia, but there wasn’t a gay tzar of Russia either, nor did the gay Jewish tzar of Russia have a nonbinary person and an asexual person and a bisexual person and the fourth person was probably the trans person and I didn’t catch it, in their inner court. If we’re gonna go with homonormative 18th century Russia, we can also have homonormative 18th century Russian Jews.
I dunno. The author is Jewish, and I’m not, and I’m not, like, offended by it or anything, but I feel like you can only draw so much “inspiration” from Jewish mysticism before you have to just admit that everybody is an actual Jewish mystic. Like, the big plan to stop the bad guy at the end, and I’m not going to get more specific because spoilers? I know exactly where that came from.
Also, and this is probably just me being petty, but the evil tzar is called “Moy Tzar” nearly every time he’s referred to in the book and there is no other Russian anywhere, and it’s italicized each and every time, and … blech.
So like I said: I have lots of gripes, but … six hours. One sitting. On an ebook. Which I then spent real money to get a physical copy of. I have not quite gone so far as to put this on my end-of-year list, but we’ll see how I feel about it in a week. Go pre-order it, and you can read it on May 7th.
“I don’t understand reviews sometimes,” he said, as the first sentence of his book review.
I have received two books through my new Illumicrate subscription– one, Fathomfolk, was already on my radar, but Elizabeth May’s To Cage a God was a book I’d never heard of by an author I’d never heard of. Which sounds like snark, but I hope it’s obvious that it isn’t– there are lots and lots of books, as it turns out! Anyway, I looked it up on Goodreads when I was ready to start it, and … well, it didn’t look hopeful. Generally anything under a 3.5 is going to be a rocky road, and this is at 3.3 right now. Sometimes that happens solely because a book is written by a woman or a person of color, though, or– God forbid– features women or people of color, or The Gays, so it’s not always a useful metric, but it’s usually a fair bet that an aggregate score under 3.5 is going to be a mixed read at best.
I’m happy to say, having read the book, that I don’t have any idea what the hell the reviewers are on about on this one. This book is indeed written by a woman, and does feature The Gays, but scanning through the reviews didn’t immediately produce any reviews that appeared to be the result of a pile-on or a Neanderthal eruption, so I just stopped looking and stopped worrying about it.
To Cage a God is a political thriller wrapped up in an intriguing magic system with a dollop of romantasy on top, and at its best moments it reminded me of something that Lisbeth Campbell might have written. And, honestly, this book and The Vanished Queen have a lot in common, and although To Cage a God has the romantasy aspect and tilts just a bit more toward YA than Queen does, if you enjoy one you’ll likely enjoy the other.
I want to talk about that magic system for a bit, though, because it’s super cool. All of the POV characters are part of a conspiracy against the Evil Empress (not actually her name, but it’s more fun to call her that) and all of them have different motivations and abilities that they bring to the revolution. Magic abilities in this world are granted by literally– and, it’s implied at least, physically, take a close look at the cover– imprisoning a dragon inside your body, and dragons are gods. The book uses the words pretty interchangeably, but the gods have teeth and claws and move around and are not remotely beyond inflicting pain on their hosts if they feel like it. In fact, one character’s god hates her and she has to more or less practice blood magic in order to convince it to do anything. The gods also have opinions about each other, and at least one relationship in the book is driven by mutual attraction of the gods as much as the humans involved. It’s really cool, and I’m looking forward to more exploration of the idea in the conclusion to the series, which I believe is currently planned as a duology but stands really well by itself. All of this stands against the background of a war with another nation that is talked about but never appears on the page, so I assume the sequel will delve into figuring out what to do with the new political status quo at the end of the book.
I have some minor gripes– the Evil Empress is a bit much, but in a sort of delightful way– one can imagine Glenn Close or Angelina Jolie just devouring scenery by the handful while playing this character, and the book as a whole is a little tropey, but tropes become tropes because when they’re well done they’re effective, and they are. It’s always nice to pick a book effectively at random and be rewarded by it, and I didn’t even pick this one, so it’s a genuine pleasure to be able to recommend it. I’ve ordered the non-Illumicrate hardback so that I have something to match the sequel on the shelf when it comes out. You don’t need to buy two copies, but definitely check it out.
From the “I’d have two nickels, but it’s weird that it happened twice” department: Between Kyne Santos, who wrote this really awesome fucking book, and a simply outstanding TikTok account called Carrie the One, I follow two different math-based drag queen accounts on social media, or at least I did before I killed off my TikTok account. I say an awful lot that you already know from the title and the cover whether you want to read this book or not, but let’s be real here: a book about math written by a drag queen might be the ultimate “you already know if you want to read this” book, and to be honest this is less of a review than a notification that this book exists, and you might have missed it, and if the notion of reading this book rustles your jibblies in literally any way at all you should go spend money right away.
This book is part memoir, part textbook (simultaneously of mathematics, the history of gay culture and the drag movement, and of the history of mathematics) and part adorably unhinged geek-out about how fucking cool math is. You probably need to be at least comfortable with algebra to be able to fully appreciate it, if only because it’s kind of hard to talk a lot about math without getting at least a little bit into the weeds, but Kyne’s going to be explaining what ℵ0 is at some point and if that terrifies you you should at least take a deep breath before jumping in. It’s only 233 pages, though, so even if you have a rough time with it it’s not terribly long.
Each chapter takes on some aspect of mathematics– there’s a chapter on infinity, a chapter on algebra, a chapter on what “proof” means in a mathematical context and what the difference between numbers and numerals are, and so on, and Santos interweaves their own story and the history bits into the more technical (but again, not super technical, so far as it goes) math-focused parts. I picked up a couple of things that I am absolutely going to be bringing up in class, or at least with my Algebra kids– I have my lesson plans for Monday done already, and they’re directly from an anecdote in this book about imaginary square numbers that absolutely set my brain on fire– and Santos is one of those people who can carry a lot of what could be a slog just by sheer enthusiasm for the subject matter. Again, if you’re even the least bit curious, absolutely give this a shot. It’s well worth it.
My usual line on Beyoncé is that I’m a big fan of Beyoncé as an entertainer and maybe not such a big fan of her music. I buy everything pretty religiously as it comes out but what usually happens is that there are a few tracks from any given album that I like a lot and I can take or leave the rest of it. Her collaboration with her husband was an exception, and I liked her live album a lot, but Cowboy Carter is the first studio release from her where I genuinely feel like every single track is a banger. It is emphatically not a country album, despite the existence of maybe three country-ish songs (Protector, Jolene, and Texas Hold ‘Em) and Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton both doing short spoken cameos. I don’t know what the hell it is. She calls it “a Beyoncé album,” and that’s just gonna have to be good enough for us mere fucking mortals. There’s opera on this damn thing. She’s doing whatever the hell she wants, and it’s amazing, and sooner or later I’m going to have to reconsider that disclaimer because she’s starting to stack up exceptions.
Oh, and speaking of the Jolene cover: it slaps. It’s a great update to the song and I love it. I love the original too. I love other updated versions of it. Music is good.
Shōgungetting a new Hulu miniseries somehow led, not to me not actually watching the miniseries, which for the record I’ve not heard a single bad thing about, but ordering the books, which are currently only being printed in two volumes because the motherfucking thing is 1500 pages long. I’m not even sure why I did it, to be honest, because I broke my current “don’t buy new shit” reading rule to do it, and even once they got here I was convinced that I was going to read a hundred pages and quietly put them away because they were going to turn out to be super fucking racist.
So naturally I blew through the first (700-page) volume in about a day and a half. I have not picked up the second yet, but I’ll have it read by the end of Spring Break. And it’s interesting– I kind of want to compare it to Gone with the Wind, except Gone with the Wind is a really amazing story that was written by a racist who wanted to promote racist ideas and is chock-full of racist characters, but Shōgun is a really amazing story chock-full of racist characters (basically every person in the book thinks everyone of a different ethnicity or religion from them is a subhuman, and some of them don’t even extend humanity to all of “their” people depending on their economic status) but I don’t think the book itself is racist, nor does reading the book make me want to look askance at James Clavell. If anything, I think Clavell would land on the side of the Japanese if he had to, and while I’m only halfway through the book it’s not remotely as white-savior as I was expecting it to be. Like, this would be a fascinating book even if Blackthorne wasn’t in it at all; the book doesn’t really revolve around him at all.
There’s an interesting article on Vox about how historically accurate the show is; the condensed version is “good enough,” and while I’m hardly an expert I certainly haven’t hit anything that had me looking twice. One way or another, I think I can probably recommend this pretty whole-heartedly, with a caveat that, again, I’m only halfway through right now and who knows what the next 800 pages will bring.
Fuck this game.
I finally deleted it today, after giving it way too many chances over the last, what, ten days? two weeks? since it was released; I was ready to fight Sony for a refund after twenty minutes, and while with a couple more hours of gameplay I’m willing to admit that the game does get better after a completely fucking inexcusably bad first half hour, the bug I ran into today where every NPC everywhere was constantly hostile for no reason at all and nothing I could do would fix it was the last straw. The game is just deeply fucking mediocre, riddled with bugs and a ton of absolutely bewildering gameplay decisions that I refuse to defend, and it’s not getting any more of my time, I give up. I’m not going to fight with anyone who enjoys it because there’s a kernel in there that could be fun under the right circumstances, and I think I was starting to get into it before the bug, but after a couple of hours of experimenting and looking at message boards and trying workarounds, I am not about to start over and I’m done.
I really feel like I ought to throw a movie review in here too, but I haven’t seen anything new in forever. Oh well. Let’s pretend Shōgun counts for both.
I haven’t reviewed a video game in forever, for a whole bunch of reasons, including but not limited to the fact that that for a long time I was saving that for the YouTube channel, and– perhaps more saliently– it’s been forever since I actually beat anything. My gaming backlog, assuming I’m going back to anything that I started and put down, is literally longer than it’s ever been before, and contains some genuinely good games that I just stopped playing for no good fucking reason and moved, ADHD-style, on to the next shiny thing. I quit playing Baldur’s Gate 3 because it depressed me, but Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Armored Core 4, and a couple of others are also out there, and I’ve also downloaded The Surge and Sifu for cheap-as-hell and free, respectively, and not touched them yet. It’s too damn much, I tell you! Too much!
I started playing Nobody Saves the World because I’d hit a section of Prince of Persia that my platform skills weren’t up to par with without a lot of practicing and I wasn’t in the mood to beat my head against a wall any longer. Also, I thought I had downloaded a demo, but apparently I bought the entire game, I assume on the cheap, and then … forgot? But I played an hour and a half or so before realizing that I’d accidentally started a whole-ass new game and wasn’t playing a demo, and by then I was stuck. And I don’t mind being stuck, because this is a hella fun game, with its only real drawback being that it’s impossible to stop playing and it took up more of my life than I wanted it to on more than one occasion.
See all those characters up there? With the exception of the wizard Nostramagus, who is the only one with eyes, they’re all you, including the egg. At the beginning of the game, Nobody– a pasty white humanoid who looks more or less like the Pillsbury Doughboy without his clothes, and who, entertainingly, doesn’t appear in the above image– gets a magic wand that lets him change shape. You start off being able to turn into a rat, and over the course of the game gain a ton of other shapes, including a bee, a dragon, a robot, and the aforementioned egg. Each form has its own abilities and powers, most of which can be readily swapped between shapes, so by the end of the game you might be using the Dinosaur but have added the Slug’s mucus trail (seriously) to his abilities and also be borrowing a passive ability from the Bodybuilder that lets you knock enemies back further than you might have before. Everything, and I mean everything, is upgradable, and one of the reasons the game is so hard to put down is that there’s always a reason to play another three minutes– you’re either right on the cusp of gaining a level or a new form or a new power for a form or there’s a dungeon over there that’s ripe for pillaging or you just figured out how to solve a puzzle halfway across the map that requires the power you just unlocked, or or or or or.
It’s kind of repetitive, and at 25 hours for a damn-near completist run I’d say maybe don’t shoot for a completist run, but there’s a world out there to be saved and you’re the doughboy to do it, one way or the other. The art style is lovely and the music is burned into my brain rather unpleasantly and the sense of humor throughout is really great.
My recommendation: Go wander through a big crowd until you get Covid and an excuse to stay home for a week (Screw you, CDC!) and then download this (it’s apparently inexpensive) and go to town.
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