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([personal profile] mrissa Jul. 2nd, 2025 04:41 pm)
 

My friend J.R. Dawson is launching their second book, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, and I get to be part of the festivities! We'll be at Moon Palace Books at 6:00 p.m. on July 29, having a lovely conversation about this book and the previous book and other stories and life in general, and you can come join in the fun!

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([personal profile] mrissa Jul. 2nd, 2025 03:15 pm)
 

As Safe As Fear, Beth Cato (Daikajuzine)

In the Shells of Broken Things, A.T. Greenblatt (Clarkesworld)

The Name Ziya, Wen-yi Lee (Reactor)

Barbershops of the Floating City, Angela Liu (Uncanny)

Everyone Keeps Saying Probably, Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp)

Lies From a Roadside Vagabond, Aaron Perry (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed (Reactor)

Laser Eyes Ain't Everything, Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots)

Unbeaten, Grace Seybold (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War, Caroline Yoachim (Uncanny)

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([personal profile] sartorias Jul. 1st, 2025 10:03 am)
I think one or two old Mythies might still be reading here; at any rate, these old friends had been on my mind this spring. Came back to discover that they died a week apart at the end of May/beginning of June.

They met in the very early sixties at the U of Chicago, where both were studying. Robert was a bit on the spectrum; he said, and he stuck with it, he would never date anyone who couldn't read and love Lord of the Rings, which had blown him away when it came out. In retrospect I don't even know how he stumbled across it because to my later knowledge of him he didn't read fiction. Maybe he thought it was a northern saga when he stumbled on the first volume? Anyway, his field was religion and Japanese literature, and I remember him sitting in his rose garden reading copies of ancient Japanese texts for pleasure.

She was also blown away by it, but not especially by him. But he'd fallen hard for her, and when she also loved LOTR, he wasn't about to give up. They married around 1963, I think; by the time I met them in 1967, they were living in West LA, he a professor of Religious Studies at USC. They used to host many meetings of the early Mythopoeic Society; he'd disappear while she socialized with us gawky teens. She was a great role model for us; she was a scholar, married to someone who respected her brains, which was tough to find during the mid and late sixties.

I was on hand to deliver both their kids, now middle-aged. He married my spouse and me in 1980. They became Quakers later; they were firm pacifists and human rights advocates.

Time is just so relentless! But they used theirs well, living gently and kindly, always loving beauty, grace, and laughter.
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([personal profile] mrissa Jul. 1st, 2025 06:08 am)
 

Syr Hayati Beker, What a Fish Looks Like. Discussed elsewhere.

A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden. Weirdly I had read books 2-4 of this series and not this one. It worked perfectly well that way, and I think for some people I'd even recommend it, because this one is substantially about teachers attempting (and often succeeding) in sleeping with their teenage girl students and a mental health crisis not being responsibly addressed. All of it is very period-appropriate for the early 1950s, all of it is beautifully observed and written about. It still had the "I want to keep reading this" nature that her prose always does for me. And Lord knows Antonia Byatt was there and knew how it all went down in that era. It's just that if you want to do without this bit, it'll be fine, it really is about those things and it's really okay to not want to do that on a particular day.

William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. This is largely How Buddhism Transformed the World and a little bit of How Hinduism Transformed the World. There is a tiny bit about math and a few references to astronomy without a lot of detail. If you're looking for how Ancient Indian religions transformed the world, that's an interesting topic and this is so far as I, a non-expert, can tell, well done on it. But I wanted more math, astronomy, and other cultural influences.

Robert Darnton, The Writer's Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France. Comparing the economic situations and lifestyles of several writers of the era--how they lived, how they were able to live, how they wrote. Also revisiting some of his own early-career analysis in an interesting way I'd like to see more of from other authors. Should this be your first Darnton: no probably not. Should you read some Darnton and also this: quite possibly.

J. R. Dawson, The First Bright Thing. Reread. Still gut-wrenching and bright, superpowers and magic circus and found family, what we can change and what we can't. Reread for an event I'll tell you about soon.

Reginald Hill, Arms and the Women, Death's Jest Book, Dialogues of the Dead, and Good Morning, Midnight. Rereads. Well into the meat of the series on this reread now. The middle two are basically one book in two volumes, which the rest of the series does not do, and also they feature a character I really hate, so I kept on for one more to clear the taste of that character out of my brain. Still all worth reading/rereading, of course; they also have the "I just want to keep reading this prose" quality, though in a very different way than Byatt. Really glad we've gotten to the part of the series with contrasting younger cop characters.

Vidar Hreinsson, Wakeful Nights: Stefan G. Stefansson: Icelandic-Canadian Poet. Kindle. This is the kind of biography that is more concerned with comprehensive accounts of where its subject went and what he did and who he talked to than with overarching themes, so if you're not interested in Stefansson in particular or anti-war/immigrant Canadian poets in the early 20th more generally, will be very tedious.

Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age. Recently retired assassins discover that their conglomerate is attempting to retire them. Good times, good older female friendships, not deep but fun.

Clay Risen, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Very straightforwardly what it says on the tin. Recognizes clearly the lack of angels involved without valorizing the people destroying other people's lives on shady evidence.

Caitlin Rozakis, The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. When Vivian and Daniel's daughter Aria gets turned into a werewolf, they have to find another kindergarten to accommodate her needs. But with new schools come new problems. This is charming and fun, and I'm delighted to have it be the second recent book (I'm thinking of Emily Tesh's The Incandescent, which is very different tonally and plotwise) to remember that schools come with grown-ups, not just kids.

James C. Scott, In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings. You know I love James C. Scott, friends. You know that. But if you're thinking a lot about riverine flooding in the first place, this does not bring a lot that's new to the table, and there are twee sections where I'm like, buddy, pal, neighbor, what are you doing, having the dolphin introduce other species to say what's going on with them, this is not actually a book for 8yos, what even. So I don't know. If you're not thinking a lot about watersheds and riverine ecosystems and rhythms in the first place, probably a lovely place to start modulo a few weird bits. But very 101.

Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records. You'd think she'd have had me at "Hannah Arendt and Baruch Spinoza are two of the major characters," but instead it just didn't really come together for me. The speculative conceit was there to hang the historical references on, and in my opinion this book's reach exceeded its grasp. I mean, if you're going to have those two and Du Fu, you've set the bar for yourself pretty high, and also a cross-time sea is also a firecracker of a concept, and...it all just sort of sits together in a lump. Ah well.

Katy Watson, A Lively Midwinter Murder. Latest in the Three Dahlias series, still good fun, the Dahlias are invited to a wedding and get snowed in and also murder ensues. Not revolutionizing the genre, just giving you what you came for, which is valid too.

Christopher Wills, Why Ecosystems Matter: Preserving the Key to Our Survival. "Did the author have a better title for that and the publisher made him change it to something hooky?" asked one of my family members suspiciously, and the answer is probably yes, you have spotted exactly what kind of book this is, this is the kind of book where someone knows interesting things about a topic (population genetics and their evolution) and is nudged to try to make its presentation slightly more grabby for the normies in hopes of selling more than three copies. It's interesting in the details it has on various organisms and does not waste your time on why ecosystems matter because duh obviously. If you were the sort of person who wasn't sure that they did, you would never pick up this book anyway.

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([personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm)
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
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([personal profile] mrissa Jun. 26th, 2025 09:07 am)
 

New story out today in Lightspeed magazine: All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. Visit the space gift shop trade convention and learn who's most likely to try to ruin things for all of us (hint: it's Earth people, UGH).

Don't miss the Author Spotlight discussing the story afterwards!

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([personal profile] mrissa Jun. 22nd, 2025 04:36 pm)
 

I've been reading my own prose in public for audiences for more than 25 years now, and I've even thrown in a poem or two as spice. But this Saturday is the first time I will be doing a dedicated poetry reading! If you're a Nebula attendee or a SFWA member, please join us on Saturday, June 28th, at 11 a.m. Pacific (1 p.m. Central).

A microphone with sparkles provides the information for the SFWA Poetry Open Mic, June 28th, 11 AM Pacific, Featuring: Marissa Lingen, Host: Gwynne Garfinkle, events.sfwa.org/upcoming-events

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