This furry little asshole sits in my lap while I read all the time, and this is the first time she’s decided to take a bite out of one of my books. There are literally teeth marks in the dust jacket now. Brat.
Anyway, I survived the field trip and the reward party, and now I have two days of ILEARN practice tests and a Goddamned data-collecting exercise that no one is going to actually look at but we sure had better have done by Friday or there will be UNSPECIFIED CONSEQUENCES.
I’m overreacting juuuuuuust a little bit, maybe, as normal grown men with reasonable temperaments and decent mental health recognize that waiting one extra day for a book is not that big of a deal, and also because slightly unhinged book goblins with perhaps more money than they really ought to have can just order the ebook for another fifteen dollars that goes to the same company that is shipping your preordered book late and start reading it today anyway.
This is how I know that trying to shame me out of shopping at Amazon is never going to work: it is specifically their fault that I don’t have this book right now, and I gave them more money so that I didn’t have to wait 24 extra hours.
I have a sickness.
Today was madness from start to finish, my room was way hotter than it had any reason to be, and I am very nearly dead. I meant to stop at the post office (this Amazon thing here is not the only problem I’m having with getting my shit shipped to me; I’ve had a package tied up in Evansville, of all fuckin’ places, for over a week) and at some point after pulling off the highway I slipped into a fugue state and the car starting driving me home instead of to the post office without my permission. Once I realized where I was actually going, I lacked the strength to alter my direction and just went the hell home. Tomorrow we have a field trip, then half a class, then lunch, then two shortened classes and a reward party. I already told the kids in the two and a half classes I’ll actually see that we aren’t doing a damn thing. There is no universe where education can take place under those circumstances. There is only keeping them alive and me out of jail.
Also, after talking to my boss, I’m taking the day off instead of going to this.
I’ve got 300 pages left in A Court of Silver Flames, which means that I ought to be ready to start A Court of Splintered Harmony by bedtime tomorrow at the latest, so hopefully the damned thing shows up on time, as my luck with packages lately has been absolutely atrocious. This is going to be a really weird week; tomorrow is a relatively normal day but it’s a Tuesday after a long weekend. Wednesday the 8th graders have a field trip all morning and then the afternoon is going to feature a reward party for kids who got through the first quarter without being idiots or assholes. Thursday and Friday will be practice tests for the ILEARN, and then the first actual checkpoint is next week, after an election-related e-learning day. Maybe I’ll go to the training on Tuesday and get arrested! Maybe there will be civil unrest too! Who knows.
Oh, and we have parent-teacher conferences for the boy on Thursday and a meeting with a lawyer on either Wednesday or Friday. (Adulting stuff. Nothing to worry about, but one more thing in the context of the rest of the week.)
One way or another I’m hoping the next fourteen days soar by, and this week is going to be fast no matter what, I think. We shall see.
I’ve been reading a lot of Sarah J. Maas lately– ACOTAR 6 comes out in a few days, and in the last month or so I’ve reread the first four books; I’ll finish A Court of Silver Flames next week sometime, then go into the new book, then in between ACOTAR 6 and 7 I’ll reread the Crescent City books. The Throne of Glass series is actually my favorite of her work, but it’s not as tied into the rest of them, so rereading that will have to wait until next year.
I don’t argue with people about books very often– it just doesn’t come up, to be honest– but I especially don’t argue with people about SJM. She has a couple of little quirks about her writing that drive some people up a wall, and while I don’t share them, I get it, more or less. The biggest one is her insistence on using “male” and “female” to refer to her fae and angelic characters and never, ever “man” or “woman.” Men and women are human. It’s a hard line. I noticed a moment in ACOWAF a couple of days ago where a character actually uses the wrong word, and she immediately corrects herself.
The other one is her use of “mate.” The mating bond in ACOTAR isn’t entirely voluntary and tends to make its own decisions, for lack of a better word– simply making eye contact with the person who is supposed to be your mate can trigger it, and once it snaps into place, it can be ignored, at some cost, but it can’t be reversed. The fun bit, also explored in ACOWAF, is that sometimes the mating bond makes shitty decisions? The main male (sigh) character’s parents were mated and weren’t good for each other at all.
You’re gonna see the word “mate” a lot in ACOTAR. A lot a lot. And if it gets on your nerves, you’re not gonna have a good time with the series.
Anyway, I read ACOWAF and ACOFAS back to back, and I picked up another book off my Unread Shelf as a sort of palate cleanser before going into the next book. This book has lizard people in it. Lizard people are nearly deaf and psychic, so they communicate via telepathy. Only the book never uses the word “telepathy.” The word the author has chosen– or, at least, the translator, as the book was originally written in Korean and it’s not entirely clear how one translates neologisms from one language to another– is nearm. Nearm is both a verb and a noun; one nearms a nearm. I’m not sure how to pronounce it, as I’m reading the book and not listening to it; the one TikTok video I found discussing the book pronounced it “neerm,” and I can’t shake “knee-arm” out of my head even though “neerm” is probably closer.
Nearm is a dumb word. It might sound less dumb in Korean, maybe; I don’t know a damn thing about Korean. It sounds really dumb in American English. I’m pretty sure it sounds equally dumb in all the other Englishes as well. And any time one of the lizard-people shows up on the page you’re gonna see the word as many times as you might see “said” for any other character. God help you if there are more than one of them and they’re talking– sorry, nearming— at each other.
It’s got me ready to put the book down, and I was really looking forward to this book, and damn, Maas-haters, if I didn’t get it before, Iget it now.
You, uh, might have heard that Sarah J. Maas had a couple of announcements today.
I got a text from The Friend I Talk About Books With around 1:00 in the afternoon, which I can only assume was milliseconds after the titles and covers for ACOTAR 6 and 7 were released. I had to ignore said texts until I got home, at which point our conversation reminded me that I probably need to reread this whole fucking series before I read the new books, and I also very much need to wait for both of them to come out and then read both of them back-to-back. And apparently the spider on the cover of ACOFM is hinting to people that the Throne of Glass series, my favorite of Maas’ work, is being folded into the ACOTAR universe somehow?
Y’all, I don’t have time to reread ACOTAR, and I definitely don’t have time to reread ToG, which is 5,000 pages all on its own. I’ve got four more Wheel of Time books, probably right around 4K pages all by themselves. I’ve got four more Temeraire books. I have fourteen fucking Realm of the Elderlings books that I was going to dive into once I got WoT and Temeraire knocked out. I do not have time for this. I need y’all– and by y’all I mean every writer in the world, and yes, I’m looking directly at you, Adrian Tchaikovsky– to just … stop, for a while, while I get caught up. Either that or I need my job to agree to keep paying me for doing my job without me actually doing my job, so that I can just sit at home and read.
Anyway, I’m going to hit Publish on this and then go see how much of the history of the Iranian monarchy I’m reading right now I can get finished by bed. Tomorrow I’m going to tell my students to stfu and leave me alone because I have books to finish.
