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.

I picked this up on a whim in a bookshop in Copenhagen. The start was interesting, though a dense read, but quickly started to feel very meandering and directionless, full of its own cleverness and unfunny comedy. But I am nothing if not stubborn and decided to stick it through to the end, if only to experience what a reviewer in The Irish Times would call “a dazzling, poetic triumph” in 1968. The answer is, of course, constantly misogynistic, frequently racist and occasionally homophobic. It does manage to pick up in the back half and get some sense of momentum and direction going and eventually a meaning actually starts to coalesce around a man trapped in a capitalist nightmare that traps even those would would notionally be its masters, a self-perpetuating system from which the author seems to imagine there can be no true escape or break from. Or perhaps that escape is saved for Nunquam, the novel that is apparently the second half of the story started in this one, though I don’t think that I will be reading it.

Perez’s writing can be extremely powerful—I have some of her words tattooed on my arms—but while individual passages in this novel might be very powerful I didn’t feel like it cohered all that much and the purpose of most of the stylistic flourishes felt opaque to me: The second-person narration, the unjustified text, the segments in all lowercase. I don’t know what really they were in service of. Perhaps, being someone pretentious enough to format blog posts as if they were formal writing, I shouldn’t be so judgemental of someone formatting a novel like a blog post, but the only trick I found particularly affecting is the big, blunt, obvious one: The blacked out text for the things that don’t want to be remembered or voiced.

This was given to me as a present, purchased as a “blind date with a book,” wrapped in parcel paper with just the first line of story adoring the cover.

A large, 24/7, unethical supermarket, late on Friday night.

Enticing. In what way is this supermarket unethical? Is there something sinister going on here? Is the meat at the butcher’s counter not what it seems? Probably not, we never really learn anything much about the supermarket. It seems to be unethical merely in the way most businesses are. Every chapter in the book, and they are 124 of them and most of them are about three pages long, starts with a similar bit of scene-setting that is utterly irrelevant to anything that actually happens. And in the end what happens is not terribly a lot to a protagonist that I never really found myself caring about.

People from a bunch of different alien species stuck at a space truck stop due to a natural disaster. I don’t have much of a review here, honestly. Great book. Fantastic series.

I picked this book up on a whim in a bookshop when I realised that I had forgotten to bring anything else to read during a trip I was taking.

It is prefaced by the worst map I have ever seen in a fantasy novel and it sets the tone for the rest of it. A bunch of fantasy and romance tropes ground down into an easy to swallow slop.

It seemed like it might have been going in interesting directions early on, with the fairies (I do not respect anyone using the term “faerie” or “fae” because they’re afraid of being silly by just saying fairy) being depicted as these ancient, horrible, shapeshifting beings who cannot lie and whose food you must not eat. Still drawing from standard tropes but ones had me second guessing them and the story constantly. But no, it turns out that all the stories humans have about fairies in this setting are just wrong and they’re really just standard fantasy elves.

Our protagonist’s point of view often doesn’t feel informed by the world and her life in it and just based on fantasy tropes. The assumptions she makes, the things she takes as facts or how she understands the things around her often seem out of nowhere. She is barely literate but can somehow infer a detailed history of the world from a mural. She seems to just intuitively understand so much about magic and fairies as the plot goes on despite having previously established basically everything she was raised to think about them is wrong. When she is trying to practise reading she makes note of words to look up the pronunciations of later. How is she going to do that, exactly? Does the fairy library have Google? Nothing seems at all thought through.

Some of the later revelations and resolutions seem like something that everyone involved should have some extremely complicated feelings about at the very least but these characters have no emotional depth at all so I am not going to waste time trying to unpack them myself when no one else involved is bothering to.

I don’t respect it at all but I can’t say that I had a bad time reading it either. It did get a bit tedious when the romance completely took over for a few chapter but thankfully the plot did pick up again after that. It filled time.

I think this might be the worst map in any fantasy novel I’ve read

Borders that could only have been drawn by an American.

Didn’t have me bawling the way the first two books did but it did make me cry.

This novel consistently delivers on providing truly baffling adaptational choices. From a ghost story about Franz Ferdinand’s car, to daring the reader to find and visit its fictional locations, to Kayako keeping her diary updated after her death or her hatred being compared directly to 9/11 this book had me shouting utterly incredulously at its pages at least once a chapter.

I am not normally one for romance stories and I rolled my eyes a bit at the early flirtations, but this story got its teeth into me. A beautiful story about love and how the people you love affect you, infect you, change you and become part of you.

I reserved a copy of This Is How You Lose the Time War in the library in July of 2023 and it is finally available to pick up

Strange to read at the same time as A Closed and Common Orbit. It takes a few notes from towards the end of A Closed and Common Orbit and builds a smaller, neater narrative to lead up to specifically them. On its own it might have felt more interesting, coming off the back of the larger book it ended up feeling a little empty. And the fantasy of Panga as the world that successfully pulled back from collapse didn’t feel hopeful to me, it just made me feel bitter about the world. A miracle happened and it made everyone realise that rampant, endless, consumption and destruction was bad. How convenient.

I was sobbing in public multiple times reading this in a way I haven’t since reading Earthsea. I love Sidra and Pepper so much. I see a lot of myself and people who I love in them.