It’s the same cycle, over and over. I don’t know how to get out, and I don’t know how to keep going, either.

I got this as a Christmas present having never heard of it before. From the cover and the premise—the last survivor of a war against necromancers—I was was imaging something much more strange and eldritch than this book provides. The first large hint was the fact that the protagonist was fighting for the capital-R Resistance¹. The reality of what I had started reading was cemented when a friend saw me reading and informed me that the book started as a Hermoine/Draco fanfiction. I was honestly less bothered by it being Harry Potter-related than with it being a romance. But I am stubborn and decided to stick with it, leaving it at my partner’s place as something to pick through when at her’s.

The fundamental problem with this book is that it’s over a thousand pages long. I did enjoy much of it, but by the time it stumbles across the finish line I was quite sick of it. There is absolutely no need for it to be this long and even its big structural trick could have been done with half the number of pages. Helena, the protagonist, has amnesia; she doesn’t remember the last two years of the war. Some magical process has blocked out her memories. As the plot picks up and tensions are coming to a head with her and her captor Kaine, Helena starts to remember everything, at which point the novel cuts to an extended (very extended–it’s over half the book) flashback to bring us, and her, up to speed with, before finally returning to the present once we’ve caught back up.

The most obvious possibility as to the source of her amnesia is that she did this to herself to hide things, which the bad guys bring up and them dismiss as impossible. Then later on the bigger bad guy comes in and says lmao she obviously did this to herself you morons. This kind of underwhelming or undermined twist happens a few times. At one point what is basically the Philosopher’s Stone from Fullmetal Alchemist except that it’s white instead of red comes into the plot. Nothing really comes of it for some time other than the characters will occasionally, when talking about Kaine’s inevitable death, remark that maybe the Philosopher’s Stone from Fullmetal Alchemist except that it’s white instead of red might be usable to save Kaine’s life, and then it doesn’t and they do something else that also seems like it was pulled out of Fullmetal Alchemist to save him instead. At one point Helena asserts that the stone was used for something else that I either somehow missed or was completely glossed over and only explained in hindsight. Either way seems like a stone containing the souls of the ancient dead should at be something a bit more than a red white herring.

Not that I wanted it to expand on the ancient lore stuff more than it did. The religious background of the setting turns out to have all been a lie, of course, but then it turns out the lie was also a lie and the main villain is also two different ancient figures whose real history was deliberately obscured and not only does this revelation feel completely disconnected from anything of actual narrative import or emotional weight, it also drags the climax of part two—the giant flashback—to a halt. That might as well have been the climax of the whole book anyway as resetting the narrative again after that and jumping from the end of the war back to the present of Helena’s captivity really takes the wind out of everything again.

The main purpose of the flashback section is to recontextualise the relationship between Helena and Kaine, but even though I certainly could not have predicted the plot I don’t feel like it really reveal as much nuance in the character dynamics as it thinks it does. Even if you weren’t already spoilt, as I was going in, that this is intended as a dark romance, I think that it would be fairly obvious that it was heading in that direction anyway and so by the time we reset to learn exactly how Kaine and Helena really knew each other before she lost her memory, the broad trajectory is relatively clear. I don’t really understand what people find compelling about stories where people who don’t even like each other develop feelings for each other (they do eventually bond over their mutual complete lack of self-worth and instinct for self-sacrifice, but this only comes after they have already fallen for each other for no apparent reason) nor the allure of edgy, dangerous, bad boys so really this book was never going to be for me, but I could have forgiven it that if it wasn’t otherwise so dragged out. Even within the flashback it can’t help but try to do further dramatic recontextualisations of the relationship, with the two revealing secret motivations and layers of manipulation at play in previous interactions that absolutely did not come across as having anything that deep going on at the time nor really explain much of anything that had previously felt mysterious.

And Helena and Kaine’s relationship is the only one that gets developed. Before the flashback we hear the names of various old friends, but even when we jump back in time those relationships have already fallen apart and we never get to spend any time with or learn that much about any of them. Evidently I am meant to give a shit about Soren but the only reason I could conceive that I might is because that in a previous version of this story he was named (I am guessing) Ron Weasley. The story was written with the assumption that you are already bought into these characters and their past relationships but has not been changed to accommodate the references to the source material having been ripped out.

And once Kaine and Helena’s relationship is established (over many, many repetitive scenes) it really shifts gears into feeling like a bad prequel to itself; exhaustively tying everything established in the present back to Helena in some way. Every new invention and technique that gets used on Helena she had a hand in creating, every character that has appeared she had met before, every big event mentioned in passing she had a key hand it. Recontextualising things like this is not bad (it’s the whole point of a flashback like this) but it starts to feel both excessive and like a checklist, with the story having a need to pack in every little idea well beyond the point it has become tiresome. By the time part two finally ended I just wanted the book to be over.

The book, thankfully, does oblige and doesn’t waste too much time in the characters fleeing to the countryside, entering a marriage where they still lie to each other and bicker over it, and letting the bad guy who already had his narrative climax happen back in the flashback die offscreen.

Yeah that’s right. It’s Satsuki-san. Your precious monster.

I am a bit surprised how lightly they end up brushing against the fact that Uruma was grooming girls. It’s been acknowledged, and I think it’s reasonable to write characters having complicated feelings about it rather than have them deliver moral lectures about it, but seeing as we are stuck in Sorawo’s perspective and she is terrible at understanding or enquiring into other people’s feelings we never really get that much of an exploration on the impact that it’s had on the people actually affected.

Sowaro and Toriko had better actually fuck now.

Because if you try to do everything yourself, you may find yourself in a situation where you can only do everything yourself.

Very cute for a series that focuses on internet horror stories come to live to have a sort of feature-length special and have it based on a shitpost.

T-san, though, kind of highlights how arbitrary a lot of the monsters in this series can feel. Horror often relies more on vibes than on logic but I am used to horror with more clear thematic thrust in what’s going on than Otherside Picnic tends to have. The trail they follow become a road and then a car full of doppelgängers and then a rollercoaster. Every time T-san “hah!”s people it does something different. There doesn’t seem to be much of a connection to it all other than pulling from different online posts and mashing them together.

This does make more sense for T-san, who is more of a genre than a character as emphasised by his unremarked upon shifting appearance, but it’s how the series has felt for me most of the time, not just in this story.

Cows can be wise.

While I do not doubt that cows do have feelings, relationships, thoughts and inner lives the book contains a huge amount of projection, assumption and anthropomorphism. Looking past that it is largely a collection of inoffensive and cute stories about a multigenerational heard of cattle, highlighting their individual temperaments and approaches that still has tucked away a pervasive level of pseudoscience that I cannot abide.

There is some early references to trusting cows to seek out medicinal herbs to treat themselves, but it holds off until further into the book to start extolling the virtues of homeopathic treatments. Apparently that homeopathic practitioners give animals different treatment for the same illness based on temperament shows that they are treating the animals as individuals while conventional veterinary medicine using the same treatment for the same illness is inherently suspect. Towards the end the author makes a good point about how overuse of drugs keeps animals going in awful, factory farm conditions that are otherwise awful for their health (and which also breads antibiotic resistant bacterial strains) but then bafflingly seems to lay the blame for this on the medicine and not the factory farms! This is of course rounded out with some offhand vaccine skepticism for good measure.

Could I accept this much affection?

The first few stories in this series really made it seem like the Otherside both had far more people stumbling into it and dying all the time. They run into a lot of people early on and Toriko makes it sound like she found guns lying around all the time, but that has tapered off into more general weird events. Even Satsuki’s overarching presence has started to ease off to give the girls a break and the relationship develop a bit more and make the Otherside their own a bit.

It is also feels almost bizarre at this point to suddenly have characters openly and casually discussing the idea of women dating each other when the series has skirted around it for so long. But it is in service of continuing to push Sorawo to open herself up to these possibilities and allow herself to be loved. It is quite sweet, even if she can be frustrating.

Though I am sure that as soon as she does all of that danger and the weight of Toriko’s own personal history that have been pushed aside for the moment are going to come crashing down on the both of them.

It always took me a lot of courage to go to the next step in this train of thought.

I didn’t intend to keep ploughing through these, but I was travelling again and had several hours to kill on trains. The development of the relationship between Toriko and Sorawo is very slow, but there is always some degree of forward momentum to it, in spite of Sorawo’s cluelessness. She is like a protagonist in a zombie movie where the world is the same as it is now except that none of the characters have ever heard of the concept of a zombie, except instead of zombies it’s lesbians—though she is the only person like this as everyone around the protagonists clearly think that they are already a couple. This volume does make it clear that that ignorance was somewhat willful; she is too scared to open herself up, even in her own internal monologue, to the possibility of someone loving her. Still, we asymptotically approach lesbianism.

And I know that tattoos are associated with the Yakuza in Japan but her being scared of Migiwa’s Mayan tattoo sleeve he probably just got while drunk on holiday in Central America is very funny.

Just how many underage girls has she laid her hands on?

I am surprised that the story seems to actually be angling Toriko as a victim of grooming and I am curious where it goes with that.

Very funny that the only thing physically wrong with Sorawo after so many supernatural near-death experiences is that her liver is not in great shape from going out and getting hammered to celebrate every time they survive a trip to the Otherside. She also seems to have some sort of medical condition that causes her mind to fail to comprehend the existence of lesbianism or any information pertaining to it and is too socially awkward to every ask anyone to clarify what they mean by anything.

I had was wondering why the translator decided to use both Luna and Runa for transliterating that character’s name and it looks like in the original novel her name was also written two ways depending how it’s being used, with Luna in the translation standing in for ｢ルナ｣ in katakana and Runa for ｢るな｣ in hiragana. I like to try and get an understanding of little translation tidbits like that even when I can’t read the original text at all. Language is fun!

Alcohol is scary…

Whomst among us has not gotten so drunk that we blacked out and maxed out our credit card buying agricultural equipment?

The recaps in each story can feel a bit excessive sometimes for something that, as far as I know, wasn’t serialised on story-by-story basis. Could also do without the US marines field-modifying an armoured vehicle explicitly in line with IDF vehicles specifically designed to kill Palestinians in order to fight monsters which is a thing that actually happens in this book.

I enjoy Sorawo getting jealous without realising that that’s what’s happening and her hiding things from Toriko adds an interesting wrinkle to the relationship.

They say that being accomplices is the closest kind of relationship in the world.

Quite funny to take Roadside Picnic but reinterpret the title to just be about it being nice to have a picnic in the Zone, as is the how it wears its inspiration on its sleeve with Sorawo and Toriko meeting a guy who is basically a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stalker on their second outing.

The prose and dialogue are frequently awkward which I will put down mostly to translation problems, though I think that the descriptions are also very visually focused in a way that I think doesn’t use the advantages of prose as a medium.

But I was looking for a fun, light read while travelling and it provided that quite well. Toriko and Sorawo are endearing and watching their relationship evolve is compelling, from Toriko calling Sorawo Twitter-brained on their first meeting to them looking out for each other as they become accomplices. Using actual modern ghost stories and having a bibliography that cites 2chan threads in very specific detail is also quite charming.

This is the body that was given for you⁠—look at it, torn and bleeding, throbbing still with the tortured life, quivering from the bitter death-agony; take it, Christians, and eat!

Came on my radar a couple of months ago when it was in the news as a book that Micheál Martin and Xi Jinping bonded over and sounded interesting. Compelling, tragic, quite racist in the middle, and ends with a fierce anti-Christian polemic that my inner ratheist is perhaps a tad too fond of. I particularly enjoyed Montanelli trying to pass on the choice of what is to be done to a condemned man to the man himself—as if it were a mercy—washing his hands of guilt and sin by refusing to face his own choice, and being told to fuck off and stop pretending that the hangman is the real victim of an execution.

I have not kept up with wrestling since the 2000s but I have been recently been getting slightly back into it through my girlfriend (after her flatmate got her back into it), so Alice Bell’s new supernatural murder mystery being wrestling-themed was a nice little bonus on top of a book I was going to read anyway. Might beat out the first one for my favourite in the series so far, though I did cop who the murderer was a while before the protagonist and got slightly impatient waiting for the penny to drop.

[You cannot] detect your personality and its decisions in the course of being created by your experience. You know only that you ingest the present tense and excrete it as a narrative in the past.

I have never read anything this dense with wordplay, puns and sheer linguistic playfulness. I did not understand close to all of it but all I need to continue reading to the next paragraph and experience Brigid Brophy doing something else charmingly unspeakable to the English language (and sometimes other ones as well). There is almost a tactile physicality to the prose in some parts. Is this felt joy like what people who like Joyce feel? I feel like the insufferability of my writing may increase just by having read this. The text rending the rendered text on my website unreadable. I flail to imitate it, my sincerest fattery.

Okay, I’ll stop with that. The novel starts very philosophically, with the narrator—born in Ireland but moved to Britain when they were young—wandering around an airport lounge as their mind similarly wanders, basking in the most liminal and modern of public spaces to muse on the concept of being “in transit”. Of a space of movement, of transition, of the crossing of boundaries, a space international in character and (the novel being written in the 60s) a state of being that is starting to be opened to more than just the upper classes.

In this state several peculiar things start to happen to our narrator. They undergo what they describe as “linguistic leprosy”, a state that mostly results in a flood of multilingual puns in major European languages. The relationship with the Irish language and Irishness here is interesting. The narrator is not comfortable with the language. They can not wield it deftly or easily and are reduced to making the old tired jokes about how odd the spelling conventions are. There is a lamentation in this. They have had exposure to it to think they should perhaps know it a bit more. This is put out to leaving at a young age but this rings quite true as someone who has lived in Ireland her entire life as well. Along with the leprosy there is the pain of a phantom tongue that was never really known. Joyce comes to mind again, though from reputation more than experience. The only Joyce that I’ve read is one or two stories from Dubliners. But with Joyce, Brophy and Ireland’s general reputation (or at least the reputation we tell ourselves that we have) for great works of English poetry and literature, does the ungaelicised mind seek to master its foreign mother tongue, to turn the tables on the colonisation of language?

The novel takes a turn towards farce in the second part, when the protagonist (gender previously hidden, as the book points out itself, with the use of the personal pronoun I) realises that somehow, ridiculously they have forgotten what sex they are, and tries to–within the bounds of polite public behaviour—figure out what’s going on downstairs. The sex marker on the passport has been (in)conveniently blotched by a coffee stain, their clothes are oh-so-modern, gender neutral and loose fitting, if they have breasts they are too small to be noticeable, reading the porn novel that they had in their bag and seeing if they relate to the Story of Oc’s Tongue as voyeur or self-insert and then stop just short of groping themselves in public before they realise that the man sitting across from them in the airport café is starting at them like they are a lunatic. This results in an escalating series of misadventures up to and including ending up on a gameshow where they have to guess someone’s kink live on air.

One might expect the exploration of gender to have aged poorly, but other than (admittedly fairly gaping from a contemporary perspective) lack of consideration of the concept of being trans or intersex I think it’s great and, more importantly, very funny. What has aged somewhat more poorly is the language around race that the book uses. It’s not hateful, but the earnest use of the word “oriental” and the in-passing exoticisation of the few non-white characters in the book is less than ideal.

The book transforms itself again towards the end, splitting our narrator into the dual personalities of Patric{k/ia} and then branching further off to focus on the experiences of various other characters as a socialist, egalitarian revolution takes control of the airport lounge. I must admit I didn’t like this section as much. It feels like the novel over-stays its welcome a bit, which is a shame, but I did enjoy the choose-your-own-adventure ending.

Good enough is perfect.

A lot of this was not novel to me (it’s not like I have not read advice for people with ADHD before) but it gives clear, concise and useful advice, some tips that I had not seen elsewhere before and was just overall quite motivating for me to make another round of adjustments to help get me through everything.

Just a quick update that I’ve moved my book reviews from my Goodreads account to a new Bookwyrm account. It is not owned by Amazon! They will still be syndicated over to my reviews page.

It’s because we run at different speeds that we were able to look after everyone.

Interesting to see Sonic in a story where he’s mostly interacting with humans again when the series has avoided it for so long outside of the live-action films. It’s been fun so far but has also felt like a fairly by-the-numbers adventure story and I don’t really love how Sonic looks in Imada’s style a lot of the time.

There is nothing more intimate than letting another person get into your subconscious.

Interesting guide that I am looking forward to putting to more use (or being used on me). There’s a lot of fun ideas in here, though I think that the author is coming at it from an angle of having so much experience, and having had much of that with experienced participants, that he takes a lot for granted of how easily things will come. I am also a little doubtful of some of the psychological framework he uses for understanding things, the “hidden observer” and such. But it’s not a psychology book, it’s a guide to things that can be fun to try out, and it does give a lot of ideas and approaches. Though, while I am nitpicking, it could really have done with an editor and a once-over on the formatting.

Every city implies the crimes that will someday take place there.

I was not expecting this to teach me how to rob a bank, but I was hoping it would have more in the way of discussions of how buildings and cities are constructed rather than just talking about very broad strokes concepts. Maybe a diagram or two, y’know? I believe I first heard about this from reading a game developer talk about how it changed how they thing of spaces and construction of locations and of game levels. I think it might have been Heather Flowers? It is not quite what I expected from that half-remembered description of it that I read a few years ago, but that’s hardly the fault of the book.

I do think the text is a bit myopic, focusing on architecture and dismissal of all else. That is, somewhat, the point of the book: To take an architectural view on criminality, but it leads it to things like raise concerns with the creep in what is seen to legally define burglary in the United States primarily in terms of some abstract slippery slope magical thinking defining what constitutes architecture and not of it as ever-increasing criminalisation and abuse of state power, and seems far worried about this than of the surveillance state, which is dismissed as not that big of a deal.

It wants to, and acknowledges that it wants to, focus on interesting, sexy, capers and sophisticated career criminals—an architect turned bank robber of course gets a large part of a chapter dedicated to him—but the vast majority of property crimes are committed by the poor and desperate, who are only fit to be included as humorous aside so we can laugh at how hapless they are.