cyphomandra

Everything else I read in April that wasn't by Agatha Christie

2026-05-19T23:07:14Z

Single Player, Tara Tai
Address Unknown, Kathrine Kressman Taylor
Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School, Elinor M Brent-Dyer (re-read)
You Probably Think This Song is About You, Kate Camp
Seven Points, Amy James
Dragonsdawn, Anne McCaffrey (re-read)
A stocking full of spies, Robin Stevens

Single Player, Tara Tai. Cat Li gets her chance in the video gaming industry by being brought on to add romance storylines to an upcoming big budget release; but Andi Zhang, her new non-binary boss, hates romance, is traumatised by a previous doxxing, and is being set up to take the fall for the game failing by evil managers. Obviously they fall in love. I liked bits of this while never being entirely convinced by either the logistics of the game design or the characters.

Address Unknown, Kathrine Kressman Taylor. Short, quietly devastating series of letters between a Jewish art dealer living in San Francisco (who has relatives in Germany) and his former close friend and business partner, who has returned to Germany in the early 1930s. Published in 1938, unfortunately not difficult to read as currently relevant.

Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School, Elinor M Brent-Dyer. Re-read. Lavender is spoilt, highly strung, and the star of her aunt’s series of geographical readers in which they visit various countries; WWII having cramped their style somewhat, she ends up at the Chalet School and after the usual series of mishaps, becomes a much better person. I do think this could have been much more interesting if told from the pov of Lilamani, Lavender’s friend from Kashmir, who shows up here briefly (and only gets two years at the Chalet School) but it’s perfectly adequate and I do like Brent-Dyer’s Peace League and her insistence (via the staff) that the pupils are not sheltered from news of the war.

You Probably Think This Song is About You, Kate Camp. Kate and I are contemporaries (her mother was my English teacher) but although I recognise a lot of her childhood we had wildly different teen experiences (Camp’s involve a lot of alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and violent unstable boyfriends; mine were more along the lines of some alcohol, complicated friendships, and a ridiculous amount of reading), although we intersect again in adulthood. I am, however, unsure how much of this is accurate and how much fiction; the opening chapter has this bit where the child Kate is obsessed with a few lines from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamboat, singing them over and over despite her family’s gentle mockery. But the lines Camp quotes (“always hoped that I’d be an apostle...” etc) are clearly from Jesus Christ Superstar, credited as such in the opening front matter, and I can’t quite decide if this is a genuine mistake or a signal that the author is not entirely to be trusted. However the writing is great and I liked the chance to get a different view on the same world and time.

Seven Points, Amy James. Novella sequel to Crash Test in which Jacob gets a chance to fill in as an F1 driver - but will doing this compromise his relationship with Travis? Not particularly tense and comes across as too much wish-fulfilment, plus I don’t like the pairing teased in the closer.

Dragonsdawn, Anne McCaffrey (re-read). I know I have read this before but the only bit that felt familiar was the bit when HNO3 is being described and starts sounding like the agenothree of the future books, because it annoyed me then and it annoys me now :D (not that it happens! But the description feels forced). First settlement of Pern, the discovery of fire lizards, surviving Thread, developing dragons, an impressively nasty female villain and her evil plot; this book has to get through a heck of a lot and sometimes logic and characterisation get jettisoned in the process. I find Sallah intriguing as a flawed (seriously) character, additionally hampered by McCaffrey’s always slightly disturbing takes on gender roles and romance initiation; I suspect last time around I was much more interested in Sorka (first to impress fire lizards, first Weyrwoman etc) but now I find her lacking in comparison to Menolly. I do not think I’ll re-read the other early ones but Dragonflight is still tempting me.

A stocking full of spies, Robin Stevens. Book 3 in the Ministry of Unladylike Activity series, and we’re at Bletchley Park, where Hazel is working and where May, Nuala, and Eric, can be usefully employed as runners and solve a murder while they’re at it, not so incidentally also clearing Daisy’s brother Bertie in the process. I do like the setting in this a lot and there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on, but I will always miss Daisy and Hazel as narrators (not that I don’t like the others - just not as much, and somehow splitting the narrative between three feels much more crowded than having Hazel write it all down).

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Agatha all along

2026-05-06T02:10:10Z

The mysterious affair at Styles (1921)
The murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
The big four (1927)
Peril at End house (1932)
Lord Edgeware dies (1933)
Death in the clouds (1935)
Cards on the table (1936)
The ABC murders (1936)
Dumb witness (1937)
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938)
Sad cypress (1940)
Sparkling cyanide (1945)
Death comes as the end (1945)
Taken at the flood (1948)
Crooked house (1949)
Mrs McGinty’s dead (1952)
Dead man’s folly (1956)
Cat among the pigeons (1959)
The clocks (1963)
Miss Marple’s final cases (1979)

About 20 years ago I sat a professional exam the preparation for which took up considerable amounts of my reading time, and as a reward for passing it I decided I would read all Agatha Christie’s detective stories in chronological order. I promptly ran aground on the jingoistic global conspiracy ones that are laden with racial and national stereotypes and bailed before I got very far, but nearly ten years ago I read all the Miss Marples in order, which worked a lot better, and vaguely thought about going back and doing the same with Poirot.

I am still not entirely sure what happened but I read all of these in totally chaotic order (I have put them in a neat chronological list for this because it's interesting) since the beginning of April, and they’re not all Poirots, either. I did have to spend four days supervising work that requires me to do something every 20 minutes and then sit there watching for the rest of the time just in case I had to suddenly do something extremely crucial, which certainly lent itself towards reading, and also some of the library Libby editions had a bit of an explanatory note at the back with some critical appraisal, so I did check for ones that looked unfamiliar. Of this lot, I definitely haven’t read Death Comes as the End before - it’s her historical ancient Egypt one - and I’m not sure I’ve read Lord Edgeware Dies, Dead Man’s Folly or Miss Marple’s Final Cases (short stories) either.

Yes, there are terrible moments of racism (this time around I was particularly appalled at the bit in Death in the Clouds where two characters compare their interests in the hope of finding common ground - “They disliked loud voices, noisy restaurants, and Negroes.” - and while Carlotta Adams in Lord Edgeware Dies is an interesting and sympathetic character, the bit where Poirot points out to Hastings that she’s Jewish and thus may be led into danger through her fondness for money is unpleasant, especially for a book published in 1933. But I do like many of her plots, and some of her characters. Poirot, obviously, with his eccentricities, (usual) keen perception, and fondness for setting little traps for people to reveal themselves unexpectedly (in Cards on the Table, he suspects a young woman might have stolen from a previous careless employer; he asks her, vaguely, to select the best six pairs of French silk stockings from a muddled pile as a gift for an imaginary niece, and when he counts them again afterwards two pairs have vanished). In The Clocks, late in Christie’s oeuvre, Poirot has another young sidekick who has brought him a mystery to solve, and I do like Poirot’s description of him as a terrier wagging his tail as he brings a nice fat rat to his master (a master who should, if he was a policeman prior to WWI, be considerably aged and non mobile in 1963).

The later books also have Ariadne Oliver, the dishevelled apple-eating detective novelist who is tied by public expectations to her serial Finnish detective, and I like her a lot. Hastings has waned on me over the years - so clueless! So hopelessly hidebound, and terrible with women - and The Big Four (which I loved as a child, as it was the first book I’d read in which the main character faked his own death and came back as his brother, and I thought that was brilliant), which requires Hastings to “help” Poirot investigate a dire global conspiracy has far too much of him and it’s all mostly bad. But. She wrote this when her life was falling apart, as a fix-up of various short stories with the conspiracy as a throughline, it was the year after the brilliant The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and whatever else its many flaws, it rattles along with relentless enthusiasm and a certain self-aware humour - “Do you not know that all celebrated detectives have brothers who would be even more celebrated then they are were it not for constitutional indolence?" Poirot asks Hastings, who has been startled to hear of Poirot’s (imaginary) brother Achilles, and I have to laugh.

Poirot is funny quite often - in Taken in the Flood, a post-war book with bitter family infighting, a character is holding forth on the mysterious dangers of Africa:

“[…] a country where a man could disappear and never be heard of again.”
“Possibly, possibly,” said Poirot. “But the same is true of Piccadilly Circus.”

And earlier in 1937’s Dumb Witness, in which Hastings spends much of the time talking to the dog responsible for the title:

“After all this is a free country.”
“English people seem to labour under that misapprehension,” murmured Poirot.

Murderwise, I prefer the murderer not to start stacking up more bodies as soon as Poirot investigates - I think it’s in Sayer’s Unnatural Death where Wimsey actually addresses this directly , that his investigations have caused more deaths than if he’d left things covered up, but Poirot is never troubled by this (he does, notoriously, cover up one investigation, but I think that - and also And Then There Were None - are to a significant degree grappling with justice in a society with capital punishment; but again this is something Sayers digs deeper into).

I am not going to go through them all now, especially as I'm also now reading her memoir of being on an archeological dig (Come, Tell Me How you Live) and her autobiography and another couple of detective stories, but I will make a brief note here to myself to consider writing more about her treatment of adoption (odd in interesting ways) and servants (historical interest), and that latter one takes me into a brief bit about Death Comes as the End, which is set in Thebes around 2000BC. What struck me about this was the focus on one particular family, without any indication of who was Pharaoh or what was being fought over or which Pyramid was being constructed (common features in other historicals set in Ancient Egypt) as well as the no doubt terribly well-informed descriptions of all the household objects. And yes, servants (and slaves), and I suspect Christie enjoyed putting discussions about how to manage prickly longstanding servants of the house in, which to her no doubt felt timeless.

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Books read, March

2026-04-01T00:18:02Z

Books read, March

The Listerdale Mystery, Agatha Christie.
Witness for the prosecution, Agatha Christie.
Strange buildings, Uketsu
The village beyond the mist ,Sachiko Kashiwaba.
Cat companions Maruru and Hachi v5, Yuri Sonoda.
A parade of horribles, Matt Dinniman.
Common goal, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Tough guy, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Role model, Rachel Reid (re-read)
He who whispers, John Dickson Carr.
Temple, Matthew Reilly.B
lood over Bright Haven, ML Wang.
The village beyond the mist ,Sachiko Kashiwaba.

The Listerdale Mystery, Agatha Christie.
Witness for the prosecution, Agatha Christie.

These are both short story collections and they overlap, which I hadn’t realised, so probably a book & a half in total. I like the one with the policeman confronting a serial poisoner, the one with a woman pretending to be a serial poisoner to escape her murderous husband and, for a change, Wireless, in which a relative is deceived into thinking their dead husband will soon return (contains no poison). I do prefer her novels but she can do a suitably creepy atmosphere well.

Strange buildings, Uketsu

The narrator brings the stories (and floorplans) of eleven strange buildings to his architect friend; initially these all appear unrelated, but as the book goes on, increasingly disturbing connections become apparent. This was not quite as satisfyingly bonkers as Strange Pictures, but better as a story than Strange Houses, and there are some genuinely unnerving moments.

Cat companions Maruru and Hachi v5, Yuri Sonoda. Now living in the shelter with a bunch of other strays, Maruru and Hachi discover that some of the shelter cats are allowed into a cat cafe set-up with contact with the public. I will read this if one of my children brings home a volume but the characters aren’t enough for me to seek any more out.

A parade of horribles, Matt Dinniman. I’m on his Patreon so I get these early; I read chapter by chapter for the first 25 or so and then waited until the end. I liked it a lot. Not the most of all his books, but a lot. He was in town last Friday for an author talk/signing that I went to, which was entertaining. The increasing commercialisation of the series and various tie-ins is getting a bit much, though (I say, while I wonder whether I should sell my now highly collectable self-published editions of books 4 through 7).

Common goal, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Tough guy, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Role model, Rachel Reid (re-read)

I was wondering why I couldn’t remember anything about Common Goal, and rapidly discovered it’s because it’s age-gap (25 & 40), a trope I dislike, between two characters who manage to be both irritating and bland, with a structure that doesn’t work, and the only tension is “I’m so old/young, how could he possibly have feelings for meeeeee”, urgh. I re-read the other two as well (Tough Guy - burly hockey enforcer Ryan (anxiety, erectile dysfunction) falls for androgynous musician Fabian, Role Model - Troy is kicked out of his hockey team after publicly believing the (many) women accusing his former teammate and best friend of rape, ends up with Ilya’s up-and-coming Canadian hockey team and falls for Harris, the openly gay social media person who likes bringing puppies to work). They’re better but still not great and basically the main enjoyment I get out of them is having Ilya show up every so often and organise everyone else's lives (and his increasingly gay team) for them.

He who whispers, John Dickson Carr. A detective author I have never read before! American, but this starts very firmly in England, in the immediate aftermath of WWII (how immediate? Published in 1946) and the war is a heavy presence. It starts at the dinner of a murder club, but the guest is late and the members are missing, and when the few people there do hear the story, it’s an apparently impossible crime involving a mysterious woman - good? Evil? Human? - whom, it turns out, has just been offered a job by one of the people listening to the story. Good on atmosphere and on tension, there’s a murder method in here that is genuinely terrifying, and the final chase sequence is great. I am less convinced by the detective but will certainly give this author another go.

Temple, Matthew Reilly. Linguistics professor Race is collected by US military investigating the disappearance of a mysterious manuscript that, it turns out, will reveal the location of a chunk of thyrium 261, an extra-solar substance that can fuel a super weapon that will destroy the Earth itself. There’s a parallel narrative with a Spanish monk who is appalled and repelled by the Spanish atrocities against the Incans, who is involved in the original concealment of the object and who wrote up all his notes about it, and because we’re in South America the bad guys are Nazis. I liked a number of the set pieces and I liked the monk’s story, but Race himself is pretty thin as a character and I can see why Reilly, who originally said he’d make this a series, didn’t go back to it.

Blood over Bright Haven, ML Wang. Sciona is determined to be the first woman accepted as a High Mage in the industrial utopia of Tiran, with its apparently limitless power that shields it against the horrific Blight, a deadly magical attack that shreds people, animals, and plants alike. Thomil is a Kwen, from one of the tribes who lived outside the barrier, forced to shelter in Tiran when almost everyone else he knew was destroyed by Blight; disregarded and persecuted, like the rest of the Kwen, he is a cleaner who is assigned to Sciona as her assistant as a cruel joke on both of them. Readable dark academia/dark fantasy where the twist is pretty much apparent from the set-up (gosh, where could the mages be sourcing their power from?) and it is not subtle on misogyny or colonialism (both bad, in case you were wondering). It also has the sort of world building it is hard not to poke at (no one ever leaves the city. My note for this book says “where farms?”). I do really like Carra (Thomil’s niece/adopted daughter), who manages to knock Sciona out of some of her comfortable assumptions, and I thought the ending was interesting but didn’t entirely work.

The village beyond the mist ,Sachiko Kashiwaba. Lina heads to a mysterious village for her summer holiday on her father’s instructions; she stays at an odd boarding house run by an irritable landlady who sends Lina to work at the shops on Absurd Avenue (the village’s only street) to pay for her board. Episodic light fantasy - I liked the parrot, who hoards the bookshop’s copy of Robinson Crusoe - that is lacking in bite. Marketed as inspiring Spirited Away, although there seems to be some argument about that and it may be more that Miyazaki was considering adapting it before deciding on the movie himself; there are some similar character types.

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Gaming Update

2026-03-25T01:27:19Z

I have now finished chapter 13 of FFVII Rebirth on hard mode and I have 87 of the 88 items required for Johnny's treasure trove. What now stands between me and completion is a) finishing Chadley's Brutal and Legendary Challenges (I've done all 6 Brutal and 7 of the 9 Legendary) and b) finishing chapter 14 on hard mode. (I did the piano! I got my son to operate one stick while I did the other, and it only took half a dozen attempts. Flushed with success we then attempted Let the Battles Begin, which is the reward piece, and did appallingly :D )

Unfortunately the last two legendary challenges are total nightmares. Ten rounds, fighting as Cloud and Zack for Bonds of Friendship (I have made it to the 5th round, once, after many, many attempts) or as Cloud and Sephiroth for To Be a Hero (the 4th round, ditto, ditto), and because Zack and Sephiroth are not playable characters you cannot change their loadouts. Technically Sephiroth's challenge should be easier because he is a stronger character but alas because he is also the villain that I have spent so much time fighting against I tend to put off healing him and instead feel vaguely satisfied when he gets stomped into the ground AGAIN and this is not helping :D

Chapter 13 was great though - I'd forgotten a lot of it, the way Cloud is so increasingly cold and unreachable, the bit where they start fighting on the same side as the Turks (against fiends) and then end up fighting against them, the individual trials for all the characters except Cloud. The Temple is a fantastic, unnerving setting, and the gravity shifts work much better now that I know I've solved them once.

I can't quite decide whether to push on with chapter 14 or to try and get at least one of the remaining challenges first. If I get To Be a Hero and do chapter 14, I will max out Cloud's weapon, which means he'll do more damage and it should make the last challenge easier (!). However, spending entire evenings getting nowhere is not all that relaxing, and I keep eyeing my unplayed games (current frontrunners - Cyberpunk 2077, the Witcher III, and Ghost of Yotei - feel free to put in your preferences).

While dithering, I picked up Stardew Valley and did a new playthrough. I'd looked at a min-max guide for ideas, and it really emphasises fishing early (for income and because if you're good at the fishing mini game that transfers over to your next playthrough, whereas a lot of your other expertise is locked behind XP levels). It definitely helped, although I didn't get a truffle before winter and there were none at the travelling cart, so I finished the community centre on day 2 of Spring. I am also significantly better at Skull Cavern dives than I used to be - I got down to level 100 with only two staircases, and I've picked up 9 prismatic shards.

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Unstoppable! Mission Room Escape (Sydney)

2026-03-12T08:51:19Z

I have not written up an escape room for ages despite having done rather a lot of them - I think I'm up to ~65, including online ones, although those no longer count for TERPECA so I might have to list them separately. Anyway. This is my most recent, fitted into a flying visit to Sydney (fly over first flight of the morning, attend all day conference, check into wrong hotel, check into right hotel (same brand and area but with one crucial word different!), do escape room, sleep, attend all day conference, fly back on last flight of the evening).

Unstoppable!

You are a special forces group, code-name ‘Skyfall’ from the Australian National Security Agency and there is a highly classified mission for you:

You have received intelligence that a terrorist has placed bombs containing a mutated virus on a train soon to depart from Sydney.

With limited clues, you must discover which train it is, and defuse the bombs as soon as possible. You must act quickly to prevent a tragedy…

You're shown onto a station platform and given a credit card, and the first puzzle is to work out which train to catch and buy the right tickets. Eventually, you board the waiting train (an actual carriage) and, if you're successful in defusing the bombs, there's an extension to the room wherein you have to stop the train. The theming and the set were fantastic, the puzzles were good, and the whole thing was a lot of fun. My only negative was that the walkie talkie was unreliable - sometimes when you held down the button it transmitted your voice, sometimes it did nothing, and sometimes it did nothing and then beeped frantically for quite some time, arrgh. Lots of physical puzzles (I particularly enjoyed plotting a train route with multiple restrictions and working out a toilet flush code) and nifty details. It's an 80 minute room and I got out with just under 2 minutes to go.

I did ask for a couple of hints (two puzzles where I got stuck and then a third I was working on and got a voiceover telling me a bit more than I expected) and I did have to get a staff member to come in for the last puzzle, which was impossible to do alone. I have solo'd about ten escape rooms now and this is only the second one where I've had to get someone in, although there are certainly ones that would have been easier with someone else (I am thinking of the one where I had to do a DDR game with controls that were just slightly too wide apart for me to do anything other than lunge repeatedly, also the one in which the lights ran off a generator that had to be hand-cranked intermittently to avoid plunging everything into darkness). This one was similar, in that it had four controls that determined the movement of a point on a screen, each moving it in one direction, but there was no way I could reach more than two of them.

This is the first room I've done at Mission, although my sister's done one of theirs with a live actor (which I really want to try), and I liked it a lot. I am still on a UK escape room group and they recently advertised an escape room on an actual train, which sounded fantastic; this might not have actually been moving but it definitely had some of the same vibes.

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Books read, February

2026-03-04T20:20:57Z

The earl meets his match, TJ Alexander
But not too bold, Hache Pueyo
I’m thinking of ending things, Iain Reid
Everything but the medicine: a doctor’s tale, Lucy O’Hagan
Crash test, Amy James
Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey
The Detective, Matthew Reilly

The earl meets his match, TJ Alexander. I picked this up after abandoning a terrible historical m/m romance that lacked both historical setting and believable romance, and while this was better it’s still not great. T4T soft romance in which an Earl (Christopher) reluctantly leaves the comfort and privacy of his estate due to an provision in his father’s will that requires him to be married by 25 to keep his inheritance; he hires the distractingly handsome James as a valet to help keep up appearances, but events ensue, etc. I had issues with the will in the first place and also with Christopher as an Earl (does he run the estate? Where are all his tenants and staff etc?) and the lack of genuine conflict as well as finding both characters a bit underdeveloped. I did think the bit where Christopher becomes Christopher (after his twin brother is washed overboard in a storm) hinted at something darker and more complicated - he is literally stealing his brother’s clothes before anyone’s even tried to retrieve the brother, but this didn’t play out.

But not too bold, Hache Pueyo. The eldritch spider-goddess Anatema who rules over Capricious House has eaten the Keeper of the Keys, and Dália, her protegée, must take on the role - and also investigate the crime the Keeper died for. But Anatema is constantly searching for a new bride, and Dália is both beautiful and intelligent - sapphic monster gothic, heavy on the vibes. I liked it and it works at novella-length but could have done with a bit more plot and a relationship that didn't lean so heavily on Dália's looks.

I’m thinking of ending things, Iain Reid. A het couple are driving through the gathering darkness to the isolated rural farm of the guy’s (Jake’s) parents; the book is from the pov of Jake’s unnamed girlfriend, who is no longer committed to the relationship, intrigued by this glimpse into a past Jake doesn’t talk about, and hiding the fact that she is receiving mysterious and inexplicable phone calls from her own number. .I liked the writing and I liked the unnerving, atmospheric feel of the book - it’s very much dreamlike, intensely vivid and increasingly incohesive - but the characters are difficult to like, and while there is a story reason for the overbearing intellectual bullying Jake inflicts on his girlfriend, you still have to read it before you know that.

Everything but the medicine: a doctor’s tale, Lucy O’Hagan. Memoir of a NZ GP, her life and career, focusing on how she develops her own personal values (through hardship, through mistakes, through burnout) and brings them into the consulting room to meet and understand her patients. Thoughtful and interesting, a bit bitsy at times but a solid read.

Crash test, Amy James. F1 driver Travis Keeping is secretly in a relationship with an up-and-coming F2 driver, Jacob, but when Jacob is seriously injured in a crash, and Travis is unable to keep away and ends up outing both of them to Jacob’s homophobic family, everything starts to fall apart. I did like Travis while wishing we got more racing and less (paraphrased) “I felt terrible. I went out and won another race.” but Jacob is a fairly terrible boyfriend, internalised homophobia or not, and although he does do a lot of work on himself it’s all stuff that Travis doesn’t see before taking him back (to a chorus of swelling violins etc). I do think it’s an interesting failure though and I have put the sequel on hold.

Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey. I was reading an extract of Kate Camp’s (NZ writer) memoir and realised way, way, too belatedly, that her mum was my favourite English teacher (in my defence she did use her maiden name). Elaine Lynskey was a fantastic English teacher even if she never really understood my fondness for genre, and among many other things she lent me her copy of Brat Farrar, which she herself had borrowed permanently from the school library (the library card has a date well before I ever started at that school and a totally different name), and it was helpfully sticking out of the shelf at me so I re-read it (I realise “lent” may not be the appropriate word here given that I obviously still have her copy many years later but I could always give it back). I do love the book and I would say it’s despite its really appallingly snobbery, but I can't because the snobbery is so inherent in every part of the story, plot and character and tone. It wouldn’t be a story if Brat didn’t have a familial fondness for horses and for a specific English estate, nor would it be a story if his murderous not-actual twin wasn’t equally a creation of that society. But I do love it anyway, and the bit where Brat wrestles with his knowledge and what to do with it, redeems a lot.

The Detective, Matthew Reilly. Sam Speedman is a private detective with autism who despite being short, slight, and wearing glasses, manages to pull off a daring rescue of a kidnapped scientist in the opening pages, and then finally gets a lead on the one case he has never solved, a case which saw his mentor disappear without trace (although his eyes were later sent to his family) a case that will lead him into the dark heart of American racism etc etc. Sam teams up with Audrey, an African-American FBI agent investigating the mysterious disappearance of her partner, after an infant’s body is found stashed inside an old doll, and DNA analysis shows that the baby’s mother is one of the women whose disappearance his mentor was investigating, and then there are a number of set pieces (with diagrams; I would read fewer Reilly books if I weren't fond of these, but these ones are sadly lacking in the bizarre inventiveness of those of the Seven Ancient Wonders series) across the American South (alligators, flooded cemeteries, mine shafts, creepy estates etc) as the two of them discover a secret conspiracy of slave-keeping families. It is not a great book, I’m not sure it’s occurred to Reilly that if he’s appalled at the state of race relations in the US (he puts in a number of real references) that making up stuff isn’t terribly helpful, and it’s worse on female characters than Reilly usually is (Sam is a virgin who eats lunch at Hooters everyday because it’s predictable and the women there are nice to him; he ends up sleeping with a grateful Audrey after he rescues her from an attempted gang rape by various slave-keeping henchmen), and maybe I should finally get around to reading his historical young Queen Elizabeth novel The Tournament, which gets significantly better reviews and might leave me feeling less irked.

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Gaming Update

2026-02-25T02:29:56Z

I finished Burning Shores! I loved the LA archipelago and the new machines and I like Seyka a lot. I didn’t find Londra, the antagonist in this, as effective or as intriguing as Tilda, and gosh I really miss Sylens (isis - thanks for the pointer to the in-game shrine to him! It’s lovely). I may at some point go back and do a hard mode play through of HFW, because I do like the gameplay, but I think I’ll give it a break for now.

I went looking for new puzzle games and ended up playing through Is This Seat Taken?, a cheerful indie game in which you have to put anthropomorphic shapes in the exact places that satisfy their increasingly finicky requests (no noise, in direct sunlight, standing on the left but not adjacent to anyone who hasn’t showered, able to steal popcorn from a neighbour etc) in a series of city-based challenges. I like the aesthetic and I like the gameplay. The (thin) storyline, in which Nate the rhombus wants to be a movie star, could have been better, and I would have also liked more female major characters, but it was fun.

Then I started The Room 3 - the latest in a horror puzzle game series with intricate mechanics and foreboding settings, and I’ve previously played the first two. But those were on my iPad and although I’m enjoying it, my phone screen really is too small, so I am now dithering between pressing on regardless or replaying a good 2/3rds of the game on an iPad. Hmm. So instead I started TR-49, where you are searching through a WWII-era machine containing pieces of various writings, in search of an ultimate secret for as yet unspecified reasons; it’s intriguing and I need more time with it.

However. On the PS5 I have returned to FFVII Rebirth, and finally completed chapter 12 on hard mode after being stuck there for months. Fighting Corneo’s assorted brawlers was fine, and Rude & Elena weren’t too bad once I got used to their attacks, but then you go straight into a solo Cloud battle with Rufus, who is ridiculously fast, and also I was only at half health from all the preceding battles and could not face going back and doing them all over. Lots of dodging, lots of very precise timing required to hit back at all, and lots of staring contemplatively at the Game Over screen, but eventually I did it. I went on to chapter 13 but very rapidly this hits a no turn back point, so before that I have been attempting to complete all of FFVII Rebirth’s many, many mini games, in order to get the Johnnie’s Treasure Trove achievement. This requires 88 (!) mini-achievements. I have now won all the chocobo races at the Gold Saucer, done all the Fort Condor and Gears & Gambits hard mode tower defence games, shot targets in Costa Del Sol, sent Yuffie & Aerith out to clean up cactuars in Corel, etc, etc, etc, and currently I have managed to claw my way to 74.

It is definitely a journey. I prefer the mini games where they’re thematic (sure, the Glide de Chocobo rank III award was a navigational nightmare that nearly gave me tendonitis but you’re riding a chocobo!) or the gameplay ties back to the main game - getting Aerith through Cactuar Crush hard mode required me to upskill dramatically in using her Tempest attack, something I’d previously overlooked. In contrast, I dislike tower defence even when the polygons are cute and shooting targets is not my thing at all, but I am a) stubborn and b) capable of watching a YouTube video and managing to follow at least some of it after multiple attempts.

I have got one more mini game to get through that’s not at the Gold Saucer - it’s the hard mode frog challenge in Junon, in which your party is transformed into frogs (a common occurrence in FF games) and you have to stay on a series of moving platforms for as long as possible - and then I will be back at the Saucer, which has more Queen's Blood challenges, another terrible shooting game I suck at, and the sole remaining side quest, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, which requires me to beat the Shinra Middle Manager and all my own previous high scores on six minigames. Yay. And even if I get through all of those, plus Chadley’s Legendary Challenges, I still have to manage to play piano on the PS5 controller well enough to get an A grade on Two Legs D:

(FFVII Remake is now out on the Switch 2, and Rebirth will be out June. Released with these are patch updates that enable God Mode, which would make it much easier to get any of the fighting trophies - I’m not sure if they will affect the mini games. I don’t have a problem with this mode being available but I would like, if possible, to get the platinum before that).

comments

Books read, January

2026-02-18T22:28:39Z

The War that Saved My Life was my favourite this month - I liked bits of the others but nothing that was entirely successful for me.

The war that saved my life, Kimberley Brubaker Bradley (re-read).
Havoc, Rebecca Wait.
Tragedy at Pike River Mine, Rebecca Macfie.
Heels over head, Elyse Springer.
The death of us, Abigail Dean.
Cinder house, Freya Maske.
Billy Summers, Stephen King
Every step she takes, Alison Cochrun.

The war that saved my life, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. Locked away and abused by her evil mother for having a club foot, Ada’s chance for an actual life comes when her brother and his friends are evacuated to the countryside in the early days of WWII and she manages to go with them. They’re placed (reluctantly) with Susan, who is grieving the death of her female lover, and basically this remains an intensely satisfying recovery/family-building/humanising story, with horses.

Havoc, Rebecca Wait. Teenage Ida flees her and her mother’s disgrace (I think they’re in the Shetlands or the Hebrides, so lots of small-town social ostracism) by organising her own scholarship to an eccentric, failing, English girls’ boarding school (in the 1980s, which I feel I should specify given my fondness for elderly boarding school stories); but her new room mate is an arsonist, a new teacher is lying about his past, and there’s a strange epidemic of compulsive twitching and seizures slowly spreading through the school… This is black comedy, readable and well-written, and I like the girls’ plot lines. I wasn’t that thrilled about the bits from the staff povs and I did feel the denouement was lacking in punch, but I liked it.

Tragedy at Pike River Mine, Rebecca Macfie. I took my mother to see the Pike River movie, about the disaster that killed 29 miners, and got curious about some of the background; this book goes through the many, many terrible decisions made by the people who built the mine in the first place (“We’re going to be cheaper and more efficient because we’ve never built a mine before so we’re not hampered by pre-conceived ideas” was basically their approach, with a lot of doubling-down when anything went wrong - the coal-cutting machines, for example, couldn’t handle the slope and broke down multiple times per shift, but although more reliable replacements were available management were convinced that it was just the miners complaining) and the cover-up in the immediate aftermath of the disaster (I hadn’t really followed this as the original explosion was between the September and February Chch earthquakes). The movie focuses on the friendship between two women who lost men in the mine (one her husband, one her son - her other son was one of the two survivors who were able to get out after the first explosion), played by Robyn Malcom and Melanie Lynskey, both excellent as always; it does end on a surprisingly upbeat note and yet the whole thing is still dragging on legally even now (the book keeps getting updated). Thorough, but not overwhelming.

Heels Over Head, Elyse Springer. Jeremy is on track to compete in diving at the Olympics and has no time for anything or anyone else, not least the new raw talent tattooed and publicly out diver Brandon, whom Jeremy’s coach has just offered to train. They fall in love, Jeremy’s homophobic redneck family say horrible things, Jeremy & Brandon are stunning at pairs diving, Brandon quietly makes himself homeless when he doesn’t want to bother anyone about why funding hasn’t come through, Jeremy works himself up over the Olympics and feels he has to break up with Brandon etc etc. I did like quite a bit of this but Jeremy is hard work and Brandon is two-dimensional. The diving is fun? But the book ends a day or so before the Olympics themselves, which does leave one hanging.

The Death of Us, Abigail Dean. I read and didn’t much like Dean’s Girl A, in which Girl A escapes a House of Horrors (quasi religious abusive large family) only to end up having to confront her past when her jailed mother dies and leaves her the house. I liked this a bit more but I don’t think I’d read another of hers. Isabelle and Edward meet, fall in love, and make a life together - a life which is torn apart violently when they become the victims of a serial rapist (and murderer), the South London Invader. Years afterwards, the Invader is caught - Isabelle and Edward, now long separated, meet up again at court and start to work through what went wrong.

Cinder House, Freya Marske. Cinderella retelling that starts with Ella’s death, as she tumbles down the stairs of her house and becomes its ghost, bound to its physical form. Her stepmother and stepsisters learn that they can force Ella to do household chores by threatening the house, but then Ella makes a bargain with a fairy charm-seller that earns her three nights, no more, where she can leave the house, and be part of the living world again… The ghost/house bits are great and I also liked Ella, but this is pitched as queer and while Ella is bi, the grand central romance is still Ella/male prince, so I can understand the annoyance on GoodReads.

Billy Summers, Stephen King. Billy was a (US) sniper in Iraq. Now he kills for money - only bad guys - and he’s just taken one last job, which involves going under cover in a small town where he will live in a quiet suburban house and spend each day sitting in an office (with a convenient view of a key building), writing his memoir. Billy takes pains to ensure people think he’s a lot stupider than he actually is, to fly under the radar, but the process of writing his memoir is forcing him confront his real identity; and then he endangers his cover by rescuing a young woman who’s been drugged, gang-raped and dumped on the roadside. This is solid King as crime-writer (although every so often there’s a mention of the Shining, as the characters take to the relevant mountains), and I always enjoy his pacing. Billy’s relationship with Alice doesn’t always work for me (and surely she has some other friends, even if she’s estranged from her family?).

Every step she takes, Alison Cochrun. Overly responsible Sadie gets the chance to escape her family business responsibilities when her sister, a travel blogger, is unable to walk the Camino de Santiago due to injury. Turbulence on the flight over leads to Sadie coming out to the hot queer woman sitting next to her, convinced that she is about to die without ever really grappling with her own sexual identity, but then they don’t crash, her sister has failed to tell Sadie the tour is explicitly queer, and the hot queer woman, Mal, is also on it. Mal offers to be Sadie’s hot gay mentor EVEN though she’s secretly attracted to Sadie and I’m sure you can see exactly where this is going (the “I’ve never kissed a woman, show me” is okay but by the time Sadie was ordering Mal to have sex with her because otherwise she never would I was having significant boundary issues). I don’t know why Cochrun consistently writes characters with the emotional maturity of teenagers (Sadie is supposed to be 35) but in many ways this would have worked much better for me if they’d been early 20s at most and also if Mal wasn’t secretly the incredibly rich heir to a Portuguese winery empire. I did like bits of it and I did have to have a pastel de nata (okay, two) from the local Portuguese tart makers after reading, but I do wonder whether I should keep trying with Cochrun.

comments

Gaming Update

2026-01-28T00:16:01Z

I dropped the difficulty on Alan Wake II (just in time to get attacked by some exceedingly fast-moving wolves that I would have totally failed to deal with otherwise) and played for a bit more, long enough to switch POV character to Alan himself. This meant a shift from small rural town to big grimy city, and also brings into play the writing mechanic, where once you discover a piece of information you can rewrite an earlier scene and open up new possibilities. It had some neat moments, but it still wasn’t enough to keep me interested. It doesn’t help that I don’t like having to use a gun as my sole weapon (I do now have a crossbow, but with only three bolts and only in Saga’s POV) and I’m not thrilled by playing as an FBI agent, which is Saga’s job. I have therefore abandoned it for now.

As per last update I had started playing LEGO Horizons with my son, and I’m sure it will come as no surprise that after playing through two levels of that (Cauldrons! Thunderjaws! Varl!) I loaded Horizon Forbidden West back on to the Playstation. Originally I’d intended to only play the DLC, Burning Shores, but my only save was right before the final mission arc (on the beach at Singularity, where you’re about to call everyone in) and it felt wrong to start there, plus I would be completely out of practice with all the weapons. So obviously the only logical answer was to replay all of HFW, which, ahem, I have now done. I am now on to Burning Shores, and zipping round the half-drowned and occasionally erupting remnants of Los Angeles.

I think as a game in and of itself HZD still has the edge, but there’s a lot I love about HFW as well, including some amazing new characters, expanded weapons (I have finally gotten the hang of the shredder gauntlet, woo hoo), and new mounts. And I do like what they do with the story - the Far Zeniths, and especially Tilda, are good antagonists. I do not like Machine Strike (I have played the tutorial and the two games required to get the trophy, and no more) and I never bother with the face paint, although I do like that they’ve stuck a Pride option in to annoy all those gamer gate types complaining about having to play as a queer woman.

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Writing update

2026-01-13T20:15:43Z

2025 has been my most productive year for sometime! I posted ~37K of fanfic, 7 Final Fantasy and 2 Yuletide. I posted earlier about the FFVII fics I wrote for candyheartsex and seasonsofdrabbles, and I've done Yuletide, but here are the others:

I picked up a pinch hit for the Whump Exchange and then had it bounced by the mod for containing a recipient DNW, which was non con. What I thought I’d written was rough sex, which the recipient explicitly did want and I thought it was quite clear the characters did too, so I was a bit miffed and even more so when the mod reassigned the fic to someone else without first giving me the chance to fix mine but fine, I sent regrets and an apology to the mod in a mature adult fashion and then sulked for DAYS until it was less than 24 hours before author reveals, at which point I cut all the sex out and tweaked the fic to make it work as a recipient treat. I wanted to focus on Genesis’s degradation (this has a specific medical meaning in FFVII) and one particular image that got a hold of me, and it still works for that; Genesis and Sephiroth shoving each other against walls and being bitey will just have to wait for another time.

Ripping Myself Off (1317 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Genesis Rhapsodos/Sephiroth
Characters: Genesis Rhapsodos, Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII)
Additional Tags: Body Horror, Serious Injuries, Whump
Summary:

Genesis and Sephiroth, after the incident in the training room.

My lingering irritation at this meant that when I then saw another pinch hit (for my Chocolate Box recipient) for a non con exchange I pounced on that just to prove I could write non con intentionally. I wrote 3.6K of yes totally definitely non con for the deadline and then added another 15K (!) before the collection opened because I felt bad for the characters and wanted to get them to a slightly better place, which does possibly indicate that I am still doing the challenge wrong. Back in the lab again with Zack and Cloud, and it was interesting because I went into the fic expecting Cloud to be the one to do all the suffering, but it’s actually Zack who ended up the most tormented. Despite that, it’s still more upbeat than canon. I am currently resisting the urge to add more (not least because I think Cloud is going to fall apart spectacularly a few more days after the fic ends).

Exposure Protocol (16852 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Characters: Zack Fair, Cloud Strife, Hojo (Compilation of FFVII)
Additional Tags: Warning: Hojo (Compilation of FFVII), Human Experimentation, Mad Scientists, Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Rape/Non-con Elements, Whump, nobody expects the seventh infantry, Love Interest Rapes Them to Prevent Something Worse, canon AU
Summary:

“…rate of mako uptake and binding to DNA-linked receptors can be predicted via measurement of specific pharmacokinetic parameters (see table 1). In individuals with poor profiles (predicted uptake <5% of normal), toxicosis is common. Typically high dose oral has been used in this setting, but the failure rate remains unacceptably high. In this article I outline, with detailed case studies, three new methods of achieving effective levels without such shortcomings; rectal adminstration, externalisation of the large gut with mesenteric perfusion, and removal of at least 50% of dermis in conjunction with mako baths. Note is also made of the role of partially pre-metabolised mako sourced from high-mako individuals…”

from Overcoming mako toxicosis: a paradigm shift. Hojo et al. Research and Development, Shinra Electric Power Company.

[in submission]

In the 24 hours or so before the collection went live and before I did final edits, I wrote two drabble treats for the Summer Season of Drabbles, both FFVII again, one Cloud/Rufus and one Cid/Vincent; I can see where shippers for both pairings are coming from but I haven’t tried to write them before, so this was fun. I then almost had another DNW moment when I did a casual last minute check and found that one prompter DNW’d present tense, necessitating a rewrite of that treat - followed by total panic until I checked my non con recipient as I’d written the whole thing in present tense, but fortunately they only DNW’d sensible things like het.

Handover (100 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024), Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rufus Shinra/Cloud Strife
Characters: Rufus Shinra, Cloud Strife
Additional Tags: Glove Kink, Flirting, Treat, Drabble
Summary:

Rufus wants to send a message.

Regular Maintenance (100 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024), Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cid Highwind/Vincent Valentine
Characters: Cid Highwind, Vincent Valentine
Additional Tags: Get Together, Drabble, Treat
Summary:

Cid gets some assistance with the Bronco - and offers some in return.

(I then plodded slowly onwards with another Zakkura long fic, but although this is now pushing 10k the ending is still very far off and I could not get momentum. I signed up for wip big bang in the hope it would help, but noooo.)

Writing goals for next year: finish something that's not for an exchange. Try and match/exceed word count.

comments

Books read, December

2026-01-06T21:00:32Z

December was either gaming or Yuletiding. I did not read the Wells in December but I hadn't included them earlier, so here they are.

Libby Lawrence is good at pretending, Jodi McAlister
Looking for Alibrandi, Melina Marchetta
Behind Frenemy Lines, Zen Cho
Compulsory, Martha Wells (short story)
All Systems Red, Martha Wells
Artificial Condition, Martha Wells
Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, Martha Wells (short story)
Rogue protocol, Martha Wells
Exit strategy, Martha Wells
Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory, Martha Wells (short story)
Network effect, Martha Wells
Fugitive telemetry, Martha Wells
System collapse, Martha Wells

Libby Lawrence is Good at Pretending, Jodi McAlister. Uni theatre YA/new adult romance; Libby sleeps with the overly charming director just before he disappears (but just after he embezzles the group’s money); she doesn’t want to tell her best friend, who has her own issues, or any of the other theatre kids, as although she’s always previously been on the outside with bit parts, the replacement director’s cast her as the lead in Much Ado About Nothing. Messy but fun; the best friend part feels underdeveloped but the theatre stuff is good.

Looking for Alibrandi, Melina Marchetta. I kept feeling that I should have read this before, because it’s such an Australian classic. Josephine Alibrandi, Italian-Australian, is in her final year as a scholarship student at an exclusive Catholic high school; she fights with her mother (who has raised her on her own, despite her family’s disapproval of her single motherhood), goes out with boys, explores her family history and finally meets her father; it’s vivid, believable, and excellently characterised (Josie is prickly and stubborn and appealing, and her growth throughout the novel is great). Also has lots of Sydney in it.

Behind Frenemy Lines, Zen Cho. Kriya Rajasekar associates Charles Goh with the worst moments in her legal career - flubbing an interview, losing cases etc - and is appalled to discover she’s going to have to share an office with him when her boss/mentor takes her with him to a new legal firm. Charles, meanwhile, is appalled to discover he’s been anyone’s nemesis, and is increasingly concerned at how Kriya’s mentor is treating her. I enjoy Cho’s het romcoms (this is in the same continuity as The Friend Zone Experiment) but I don’t love them. This does have some great moments and I particularly like Charles, who determinedly dresses up in cosplay for his best friend’s lesbian sports-anime themed wedding (she and her wife bonded over their love for the fictitious Duke of Badminton series, which made me snort in amusement as someone who very briefly read fanfic for Prince of Tennis) and then takes the Tube to the venue.

I read all of the extant Murderbot books and shorts in a wild binge. I like them but do not feel fannish at all about them, although I can see why other people do. I like Murderbot and the voice is fantastic, but I find the humans rather interchangeable and I don’t like ART, who becomes increasingly prominent as the books go on. I will probably re-read these again at some stage and see if that changes.

comments

Candy Hearts letter

2026-01-05T21:57:19Z

Dear Confectioner,

Thanks so much for creating a bonbon for me! Really anything in these would be great, but here are some directions:

Writingwise: in general, I like humour, excitement, angst (if justified – not massive amounts of agonising over accidentally returning character X's library book before they finished it), food, moments of peace amongst activity, things that give me new thoughts about canon, and things that bring me back to feeling like I’m experiencing the canon again for the first time. I'm fine with ratings from G to Explicit. I like experimental formats - epistolary, IF, found documents etc.

Romantic tropes I like include sharing a bed, undercover as a couple, forced to seek refuge in a Canadian (equivalents accepted) shack etc. Two of my requests (Horizon and DCC) are for platonic relationships and for these I really like shared low-key activities (as a respite from the canon!), or moments of character. For both, I like non-mundane AUs, like psychic wolf companions, daemons, or Sentinel-Guide. I don't usually like mundane AUs for canons with sf/f elements but if you put your coffeeshop in space and add enough aliens I will probably like it.

Artwise: I like a range of styles, from cartoon/chibi to black & white to photorealism. I tend to like art that focuses on the quieter moments in canon and gives characters a breathing space between dramatic events; I also like quirky interpretations that give me a new view on characters. I’m happy with explicit art as long as it’s tagged!

DNWs: child/animal death or child/animal sexual abuse. Omegaverse or trans headcanons. I have previously DNW’d earthquakes but am back to being okay with fictional natural disasters.

Compilation of Final Fantasy VII

Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Genesis Rhapsodos/Cloud Strife

Pretty much anything goes with this; I love Cloud, I love how much he tries despite how messed up he is, and he deserves pretty much anything from fluff to angst to complete crack. I am always up for Zack & Cloud, pre-game or Nibelheim, sharing a moment or on a mission or trapped in the lab - Zack is such a great character. I am also up for Zack Lives AUs and I always like time travel.

With Genesis - he's grown on me and there's so much scope here. Meeting up when Cloud is a trooper and somehow impresses him, or post-game when they're the only two survivors who can really compare experiences - or PWP at any and all times inbetween. I am okay with dub con for this pairing and it doesn't have to be a happy ending, although if they earn it that's great.

For art - really I will just stare at all of them forever. Fight scenes! Uncomfortable meals together! Lost in the snow!

Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024)

Roche/Cloud Strife
Sephiroth/Cloud Strife

Gosh I have no idea who my fave is :D Anyway, I love these games and their shiny, beautiful characters. Midgar looks amazing and the open world is gorgeous, and I just want more. Roche is such a delightful goofball who ends up breaking my heart - could things have gone another way? Is there still a chance for him to come back? What would have happened if he'd not let Cloud go after Junon, or even followed after him earlier?

Sephiroth - well. He's so obsessed with Cloud, and the end of Rebirth is just brutal. I will take pretty much anything in this, from what actually happened in Nibelheim to canon AUs to dubcon/noncon (which is practically canon), although please actually don't turn Cloud into a mindless puppet. He's fought so hard to avoid that.

Horizon (video games)

Aloy and Beta

I am replaying Forbidden West at the moment and I just have so many questions about these two. What was Beta's upbringing like? I'm not sure the Far Zeniths had any other children on the ship (too wedded to their control and power) - what did she think of her role, and what was it like when she saw Aloy for the first time? How does Aloy feel about being no longer alone? Really I just want more of the interactions between them, in game or after (although I haven't yet played Burning Shores so nothing that relies heavily on events then).

Dungeon Crawler Carl Series - Matt Dinniman

Carl and Princess Donut and Katia Grim

I love Carl, who is trying so hard despite everything being so stacked against him, and how he teeters between his goals and their costs. I love Princess Donut, who is very much a cat despite everything, and Katia, who has grown so much (ha!) during her time in the dungeon. I love the gamelit/RPG tropes (loot boxes! stat increases!) and the horror tropes and the pokes at reality TV. I love that everyone has their own agenda (look at Donut, running a revolution in her spare time) and I really, really love the way that Carl, even as he blows everything up and gets increasingly unstable, can listen to others, respect their opinions, and give them chances to make their own paths.

Prompts - go wild. I'm okay with glimpses of backstory for all three (what did Donut think of Carl originally?) or a missing scene from the series, or an AU where a floor goes differently (or, I don't know, a bizarre AU where suddenly everyone is a cat EXCEPT Donut :D ). Feel free to play with formats. Please don't permanently kill any of the requested characters but otherwise darkness consistent with canon is fine. I am fine with gore. I do not ship any of the nominated characters - one of the things I like about DCC is that Carl hasn't had any sexual relationships since entering the dungeon. Canonical relationships (Katia/Bautista and I SUPPOSE Donut/Gravy Boat) are fine but I don't really want them to be the focus.

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Yuletide reveals

2026-01-05T21:55:45Z

Yuletide! I was neither travelling internationally nor moving house this year, so I signed up with enthusiasm, got my assignment, and then played video games (mainly Blue Prince) with all my spare time in a completely unhelpful fashion until I was right up against the default deadline and starting to panic.

Mostly this was me procrastinating, but there was a little bit of assignment angst; I’d matched on Dungeon Crawler Carl again, and I’d offered Carl, Katia and Donut. I specifically didn’t offer the AI because this mainly seems to get people wanting Carl/AI (which rejoices in the ship name aiCarly :D) and I really don’t want pairing fic for Carl, either reading or writing. However although my recipient only nominated Carl, they obviously do like this pairing and indeed prompted for it. This meant I dithered a bit about whether to attempt it, how to do it, etc etc, but this was not their only prompt and they did mention outsider pov and playing with formats and in the end I stopped trying to do the AI and went for that.

The title, a riff on Wallace Stevens, came to me early on and was great apart from the bit where I only had three segments written by the posting deadline and would need another ten to make it work. I therefore moulded these into a story under a modified title, added the first part of the framing sequence, posted this for the work deadline as a functional but brief story, and then reread the entire DCC series, fixing each segment as I went and writing new ones (obviously I am a terrible example when it comes to deadlines and if you are a Yuletide mod please ignore this entire discussion :D).

Deciding who to do for each book pov was fun. Mrs Parsons was an early pick for opening book 1, with Bea as the closer, and I really wanted Katia in book 4, so you get her character arc at two points, from her and then from Louis' pov. I wanted noncrawlers as well, which got Signet (and her writers' room), Gary (with bonus AI), Fire Brandy, and also Mordecai (I dithered about where to put him in but there's a lot going on in Butcher's Masquerade so it worked well there). I couldn't decide between Imani or Elle but when it ended up being Bedlam Bride Imani worked better for a character pov that needed to be about Carl. And I also wanted villains with complexity, so Lucia Mar and Quan Ch. I was slightly startled by the number of character tags I ended up using.

I’d thought that book 7, which was the turning point, would be the longest piece, and as I was going through the first draft I just wrote three or four lines of Prepotente fuming in prison to see if I could get his voice, and then did the rest of the sections before skimming This Inevitable Ruin. At which point I re-read the lines and realised they were infinitely stronger if I didn't add a whole bunch of text, yay.

A pinch hit for Blue Prince came up while I was hastily working, and while it went very quickly, it meant I’d checked the app and seen the other Blue Prince requests, including thefourthvine’s. I went back to DCC, but the prompts nagged at me, especially the one about new upgrades for rooms. On a quick writing break run through Mount Holly (the house in Blue Prince), I ended up staring thoughtfully at what look like doggy doors on the back of the Kennel and it occurred to me that you could combine the Kennel (contains dogs) and the Patio (spreads gems) and spread puppies all over the house.

After that I made random notes whenever another room occurred to me, finished the DCC fic (almost - I wrote the second half of the frame sequence three different ways and didn’t like any of them) and wrote the Blue Prince treat on Christmas Eve, allowing for a suitably festive battle with formatting on AO3 arrgh why can I never get the spacing right although at least swapping to rich text helped with most of it. I then wrote the final final version of the DCC closing frame sequence a whole hour before reveals, after present and stocking opening but before cooking Xmas dinner. I was probably highly guessable by anyone who read my previous DCC fic due to using the same chat skin but I really didn't have time to sort another one!

Both works have been pretty successful for me in Yuletide and I had a lot of time to read fic, so all around an excellent experience.

13 Ways of Looking at a Lit Fuse (4100 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dungeon Crawler Carl Series - Matt Dinniman
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl), System AI (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Katia Grim, Growler Gary (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Princess Donut (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Louis Santiago, Firas Zaman, Beatrice (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Miriam Dom (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Lucia Mar, Imani (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Prepotente (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Quan Ch (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Mordecai (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Tsarina Signet (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Fire Brandy (Dungeon Crawler Carl)
Additional Tags: POV Outsider, Karaoke, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Chatlogs, canon compliant up to the end of book 7, Ethical treatment of NPCs
Summary:

Carl, as others see him.

Blueprints (the we're going up up upgrade remix) (1127 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Blue Prince (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Simon P. Jones (Blue Prince)
Additional Tags: terrible puns, Puppies, Yuletide Treat, adventures in drafting, hey I found a bunch of blank upgrade disks
Summary:

Simon proposes a few changes.

comments

Yuletide

2026-01-01T10:53:33Z

Yuletide recs! I have actually managed to read quite a lot of Yuletide fic this year, and it's been great wallowing happily in some amazing stories.

My gift is for KJ Charles' Think of England series, and is a cracking adventure/undercover moment on a train (in the snow!), as well as having some great Archie/Daniel moments (and Pat & Fen in a cameo).

Taking Initiative (2299 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: England Series - K. J. Charles
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Archie Curtis/Daniel da Silva
Characters: Archie Curtis, Daniel da Silva (England Series), Patricia Merton, Fenella Carruth
Additional Tags: Post-Canon
Summary:

Archie takes matters into his own hands while Daniel is undercover.

I have also loved:

The Desperados Don't Want to Come to Their Senses (6963 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Jasper de Zoet, Elf Holloway, Peter "Griff" Griffin, Dean Moss
Additional Tags: Social Media, Mixed Media, Post-Canon, POV Outsider, Character: The Entire Internet, can the story still be a comedy if one of its protagonists has been dead since the beginning
Summary:

allie! allieshouldbewriting · December 13
people act like it’s so poignant/whatever that jasper de zoet gave up music after his bandmate died to go into psych but what nobody acknowledges is that man had PATIENTS. tragic gay yearning is not a victimless crime. there’s rpf about my psychologist and i have to live with it
❏ 305 ↹ 201 ♡ 2126 ⤊ 6290

(The social internet dissects Utopia Avenue, November-December of 2025.)

I read Utopia Avenue two years ago and loved it, and I keep meaning to go back and re-read it as well as read all the other related Mitchells I haven't gotten to yet. This is a fantastic story via internet media, about the fans of Utopia Avenue and of those who ship Jasper and Dean in particular (the "Despers/Desperadoes" of the title). It is very funny, extremely on point, and it does all this by being about how you go on after someone you love has died.

#footscraygoose (4249 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Soulmate Goose AU Suggestion - shitty-check-please-aus (Tumblr Post), Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Characters, Original Soulmate Geese
Additional Tags: Soulmate Goose of Enforcement, Twitter, Emails, Work Skin In Use, Social Media, Australia, biosecurity, Government Regulation, Crack Treated Seriously, Birdwatching, Public Servants Trying Their Best
Summary:

barb's cooked
bowerbirder
everyone is giving jennyjennyaus shit but i can confirm, LESSER WHITE-FRONTED GOOSE IN FOOTSCRAY?????????? not pictured: the poor woman the goose started harassing for her sandwich after this lol.

Dr Tom March
fungustom
bowerbirder Have you added it to iNaturalist yet? Absolutely bonkers that there's a vagrant this far south. Climate change maybe?

Another formatting masterpiece (as someone who did two fics requiring workskins for the 2024 Yuletide and STRUGGLED I am in awe of these) only with 100% more Australianisms and a justifiably ticked-off goose, this takes the soulmate goose troop and runs with it (unfortunately without checking in with biosecurity first). Fantastic.

Hit the Bricks! Four Things Not to Miss in Lego City Old Town (2897 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: LEGO Botanical Garden, LEGO Natural History Museum
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding, Easter Eggs, lego ruritania, diagetic documentation, Illustrations
Summary:

Four moments in Lego-Duplo relations.

I had not thought of Lego and Duplo as uneasy European neighbours with rich historical interactions but reading this fic made that seem like a terrible oversight. This even has build kits to go with the different scenes.

There's No Discharge in the War (12369 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Stebbins (The Long Walk), Ray Garraty
Additional Tags: Time Loop, Temporary Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Ambiguous/Open Ending
Summary:

He's been walking for a very long time.

Stebbins on a timeloop. I keep meaning to write up my impressions of the movie of The Long Walk, which I saw earlier this year (tldr: I loved it) and I keep meaning to re-read the book, which is in a box somewhere as part of the Bachman collection. This is horrifyingly effective, tension without relief, and it's also a fantastic sideways look at the source.

in the place of the friends I love (10770 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Kivrin Engle & Father Roche, James Dunworthy & Kivrin Engle
Characters: Kivrin Engle, James Dunworthy, Colin Templer, John Bartholomew, Lupe Montoya
Summary:

She woke in Heaven, as Roche had thought she must.

I love The Doomsday Book despite having issues with Willis' later works, and this is a brilliant, painful take on Kivrin's immediate recovery post-drop, and the (missed) communication theme so common to Willis is heartbreakingly appropriate here. Great characterisation and a very touching story about loss and grief, and what they leave behind.

said the spider to the fly (1484 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dredge (Video Game)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Fisherman & Travelling Merchant (Dredge)
Characters: Fisherman (Dredge), Travelling Merchant (Dredge)
Additional Tags: Canon Compliant, Angst, Weirdness, Friendship, Card Games, Canon-typical eldritch horror, Yuletide Treat, Yuletide 2025, she's normal and he..... isn't
Summary:

Trapped in the bay at Gale Cliffs during a storm, the fisherman and the travelling merchant talk, eat supper, and play a couple of games of cards.

I loved playing Dredge (horror fishing game with a disturbingly effective madness mechanic) and this is a surprisingly cozy quiet moment for it, between the most sensible character in the game and the one you play as. It's vivid and affecting.

Snow on Snow (14591 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jane Marple, Raymond West
Additional Tags: Murder Mystery, Case Fic, Christmas, Queer Character
Summary:

It is December 22nd, 1962, and one the coldest winters in living memory is about to freeze Britain over. On the insistance of her nephew Raymond, Miss Marple spends the night in a remote village rather than risk going all the way to London by train. But when a man is found dead in the snow outside the cozy guest house in which she is staying, it is up to Miss Marple to save Christmas... and finish reading the draft of Raymond's latest book.

Nothing says (northern hemisphere) Christmas like a snowed-in manor house and a murder mystery, with Miss Marple there to solve it while critiquing her nephew's latest manuscript. This is also a more tolerant and accepting Miss Marple than Christie sometimes wrote, as well.

comments

Gaming Update

2025-12-30T21:27:25Z

I'm now on day 90 of Blue Prince and have solved quite a lot of puzzles, but I still have more to go, plus all the trophies that require me to get to room 46 in a certain time/under certain conditions (for those following along, I have done the sanctum, opened one door of a certain colour, and begun the blue tents). I am starting to run out of steam though, and I think it's time for a break.

The problem is what to do next! I do want to get back to FFVII, but I also want something new. I tried Alan Wake II, which I picked up as a free game - it's survival horror, set in another of those terrible small US towns, and I am currently stuck on a boss battle in chapter 2 that had an abrupt difficulty spike. My character moves unbelievably slowly and can only take 2 hits, plus I don't have the resources to upgrade my weapons yet, and while I think I can probably get through this eventually without downgrading the difficulty, it feels less like a game puzzle I can't solve yet and more like bad game design, arrgh. I do like Saga (my current character) but it has been a while since I played horror and I have also so far proven myself to be pretty terrible with jump scares. Typing this up has made me think that maybe I just downgrade the difficulty and see if the story still works for me.

I got Ghost of Yōtei for Christmas, and I also got Cyberpunk 2077 back from the person to whom I'd lent it, so those are both alternate possibilities. BUT. I also got another free game this month, and it's Lego Horizon Adventures, so last night after having my face bitten off in the Overlap for about the fortieth time, I switched gears and sent Lego Aloy out into the world, woo hoo. They have definitely detraumatised the storyline (your first mission is to retrieve some of the Nora who've been kidnapped by cultists, who are cruelly transporting them somewhere in cages and refusing to let them have bathroom breaks; everyone is rescued without casualties) and the fixed camera angles are a bit irritating, but we have already successfully hidden in red grass, shot flaming arrows into shrubbery to clear puzzles, and climbed our first Tallneck, woo hoo. And I say "we" because there is a co-op mode and my son, who's watched me battle through bits of Horizon was very excited to join me. He has put his character (who is supposed to be Rost) in the Sun King Avad skin, tho', which is throwing me a bit :D (most of the voice cast are those from the original game).

comments

Books read, November

2025-12-17T21:35:45Z

Faves for this month were the two Uketsu books and An Academic Affair.

Heated rivalry, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Long game, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Good girls don’t die, Christina Henry
The Quins at Quayles, Winnifred Norling
The pink marine, Greg Cope White
Dinosaur sanctuary 7, Itaru Kinoshita
Into the raging sea, Rachel Salde
Darkly, Marissa Pessl
Bookish, Lucy Mangan
Strange pictures, Uketsu
Strange houses, Uketsu
Glorious Exploits, Ferdia Lennon
Little nothings, Julie Mayhew
An Academic Affair, Jodi McAlister
Appointment with death, Agatha Christie

Heated rivalry, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Long game, Rachel Reid (re-read)

I have not watched the TV series - yet - but there was all this publicity about it and so I re-read these two. HR is still great. LG - well. It’s okay, but it slips out of my mind pretty quickly afterwards.

Good Girls Don’t Die, Christina Henry. Three women wake up in turn in increasingly unnerving situations - the first, in a house with a family and a job that she doesn’t remember, the second in a cabin with friends where they are being stalked by something, the third forced to run through a maze of death to survive - unfortunately the first two stories are significantly more compelling than the third, and the reveal (spoiler - yet another evil techbro who doesn’t like losing fights with women on the internet) is weak and the resolution weaker. I thought this was going to do more with the storylines being different sorts of book, but no.

The Quins at Quayles, Winnifed Norling. I read Norling’s Missing from Mallingford’s when I was young, and quite liked it, and I’ve read a few others of hers. This was, however, not good. Five cousins with almost no characterisation start at a new school and investigate a mysterious house (the book is published in 1940 so you can possibly guess some of the mystery), no-one ever says anything, and I actually took a few months to read this because I kept putting it down.

The Pink Marine, Greg Cope White. Made into the Netflix series Boots, this is about a scrawny gay teenager in the late 70s, who follows his straight best friend into the Marines - once he gets past being repeatedly underweight on the medical. I failed to read the blurb on this so hadn’t realised it was pretty much just boot camp and him deciding that the Marines were the best thing ever, and so while it’s readable and if I wanted background material for a story set in that time period it would be super helpful, I didn’t get much more from it.

Dinosaur Sanctuary 7, Itaru Kinoshita. More dinos. The neglectful father/son who loves dinosaur subplot is not my favourite but I do like Suzume learning that the blind dinosaur she is assigned to is very capable on his own terms.

Into the Raging Sea: 33 Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of El Faro, Rachel Slade. Picked up from rachelmanija and very good in a throughly detailed and depressing way about how industry practices focused almost entirely on profit can create an environment where there is no room for tolerance of individual bad decisions. I lent this immediately to my friend who works in systems safety.

Darkly, Marisha Pessl. The mysterious Louisiana Veda created the Darklys, horrifying board games with a cult following; although she is now dead, her legacy lingers. Dia (Arcadia) is one of six teenagers offered an internship with Darkly, but when they arrive at the game factory, they discover that they have to solve the mystery of the last Darkly - not just its mysterious disappearance, but the game itself, which is now being played, and causing its solvers to disappear. This coasts on vibes but is sadly all too easy to pick holes in, not least of which is how these games actually work. They’re described as board games that millions of people spend evenings playing, but with only a handful of winners (I guess the analog would be something like Kit Williams’ Masquerade, but that’s not a board game!), and then when we actually see Valkyrie’s (the missing Darkly) game play, it’s a cross between an escape room and an interactive theatre piece, which is something else again. The characters were not compelling enough to distract me from trying to work this out, the romance is irritating, and I also kept wondering how we could possibly be on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere a thirty minute drive from London. Which is annoying, because deadly mysterious board games are a cool idea, as are treasure hunts; I should track down my copy of John Bellairs’ The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn and re-read that instead.

Bookish: how reading shapes our lives, Lucy Mangan. Her second reading memoir (it’s not really “our”, it’s all about her - this one takes in teenage years, university, marriage, having a baby, COVID, and the death of her father. I have read a lot of the same books as Manga (although inexplicably she doesn’t do f/sf AT ALL), I like her writing, and a number of bits of this ring very true for me.

Strange Pictures, Uketsu
Strange Houses, Uketsu

Also via rachelmanija. Excellently creepy found horror, based around a series of pictures in the first and floor plans in the second; these (mostly) play fair with teh readers for solutions. Pictures is the stronger narrative (and written later) but I do like a floor plan. This has definitely hung around me after reading it and I may even track down hard copies.

Glorious Exploits, Ferdia Lennon. I borrowed this a few times before I finally read it, and somehow in that process I forgot most of the details of the original recommendation apart from believing it was a comedy involving potters & theatre in Ancient Greece. This is not entirely inaccurate but does omit the important fact that most of this book is about the brutal aftermath of equally brutal wars, the theatre is a production of Medea put on by a cast of starving Athenian POWs left in a quarry to rot, and it’s painfully bleak with at the most some moments of dark humour. It’s odd about women but it is good about theatre.

Little Nothings, Julie Mayhew. Liv has never had a group of friends until she meets Beth and Binnie in a new mums playgroup; they get on well until Ange joins the group. Ange, richer and apparently better at everything, pulls the group around her, and Liv struggles to keep up - will an (expensive) catered holiday in Greece bring everyone back together, or tear them apart? Everyone in this is unlikeable and there is a weird why-not-lesbians thing going on where people hassle Liv for making friends with an incredibly rich woman, and imply they’re sleeping together - and tbh that would probably make a better book.

An Academic Affair, Freya McAllister. A romance with footnotes! This alternates pov between two rival Eng Lit early career academics - Sadie (scrappy, rough background, specialises in popular fiction) and Jonah (high-pressured family with senior academic father, specialises in Jacobean drama) who have fought enthusiastically throughout undergrad and postgrad, and then while trying to exist on precarious short-term and temp work, come up against each other for a permanent Lit Studies post in Hobart. Both want it, desperately; of course only one can get it, but then the contract has this clause about partner hire… This is a solid romance as well as being very good about the difficulties of having a career in academia - both characters are union members and there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in watching management hoist by their own petard on the contract negotiations, which is not something I usually read romances for. It’s also another strongly Australian book and I presume it’s the first of another series, because there are two other obvious couples being lined up in this one. I liked it a lot.

Appointment with Death, Agatha Christie. I’m not sure if I’ve read this one before, actually. Set in/around Petra, with the death of a woman who has intimidated and warped her entire family - I did work out who but it was entertaining getting there.

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Gaming Update

2025-11-28T02:36:36Z

I ploughed onward through FFVII Remake and ultimately platinumed it, woo hoo, although it’s definitely thanks to Optinoob’s combat guides. His strategy for the final Sephiroth boss fight (which comes after a series of other fights, so you have to manage your characters very carefully to have enough MP etc left) boiled to down to block, counter stance, block, with Cloud, switch briefly to another character once they show up for heals and barrier etc, then back to Cloud (as Sephiroth will instantly target the character you’re playing) and keep blocking/countering until you can get him with a limit break before he unkindly drops Meteor on you - Optinoob when describing this started imitating Sephiroth going “Cloud, why won’t you attack me?” :D

After that I played chunks of FFVII Intergrade (the Yuffie DLC) on hard mode and I haven’t finished it but I jumped back into FFVII Rebirth. I’m still on chapter 12 of this in hard mode, which is exactly where I was storywise in March, but I have now gone back and done all the side quests I’d missed earlier that you have to repeat on hard mode to unlock more character progression, as well as some of the mini games (aargh the mini games. There are too many and I don’t know if I’m ever going to get through some of them, like the pirate’s gallery shooting one and the gambit & gears hard mode games and, omg, the PIANO). Where I am now, though, I really need to unlock Götterdammerung to be able to make it through the next fights, and it’s locked behind a series of excessively tricky boss fights - the six Brutal Challenges. I have done four, again heavily relying on Optinooob, and they were painful slogs.

As a change of pace from repeated party wipes, I picked up Blue Prince, which is a puzzle-solving rogue-like centred around a mysterious mansion, and not only is it great but I have not yet died even once. You are the presumptive heir to the mansion, but to prove you deserve it, you have to find room 46 - the house is a 9 by 5 grid, every day you start in the entrance hall on the middle of the bottom row, and when you open a door you get a choice of possible floor plans to fill the next space - some of the rooms are dead ends, some have items or hints you need, some require specific resources to select them, some interact with other rooms, and some actively punish you by removing resources or limiting your subsequent choices. When I first got a PC, the game I totally fell for was Myst, a puzzle-solving world-building lore-heavy game with (for the time) amazing graphics, and I spent hours on it, not least because this was largely before the WWW and I had no easy way of finding out puzzle solutions. The creators of Blue Prince credit Cyan (who made Myst), and it brings back that same feeling - there’s a massive amount going on here, with intriguing hints of story as well as fantastic puzzles, and it’s very satisfying when something finally works. Last night I entered room 46 (on day 28 of game time) but there’s a surprising amount left to do! It is a terrible game for the “just one more day” because a day can be over in 20 minutes if you have bad luck drafting rooms or can take nearly two hours if you find a lot of stuff, and I also now have all these notes about hints and clues and possible solutions to pore over. Recommended.

comments

Books read, October

2025-11-26T02:26:44Z

Spent, Alison Bechdel
Rivals, Jilly Cooper
Appassionata, Jilly Cooper
All of us murderers, KJ Charles
Never flinch, Stephen King
One day everyone will have always been against this, Omar El Akkad
Unwritten rules, KD Casey

Spent, Alison Bechdel. Her latest memoir/fictionalised autobio, this one significantly more fictionalised than previous (or at least apparently more!) as the DTWOF cast show up as neighbours to the fictional version of Alison (whose personal memoir has become an HBO-like big budget TV show, Death and Taxidermy, that is starting to veer wildly from her original vision) and her pygmy goat-rearing imminently viral partner. I think Bechdel does a great job working in this odd liminal space of fiction and memoir, and it was great to see the DTWOF cast again; Sparrow and Stuart have never been my favourite couple, but I like what Bechdel does with their kid and the younger (now adult) generation. Also, the cats in this are fantastic. I would happily read anything Bechdel did about cats.

Rivals, Jilly Cooper. I was sorry to see she died, because I’ve always loved her books. Sure, after those first golden four (Riders, Rivals, Polo, Appassionata) there were some clunkers, but even in the very murky depths of Score! there were still some golden moments. Anyway. This is not my favourite because I do not like Rupert and I think Taggie could do far, far, better, but it still becomes totally compelling and I find myself strangely concerned about television franchises in the Home Counties. I should track down the TV series that was made of this recently (I should, but given my issues with ever watching TV I will probably not. Maybe if it's on a plane.)

All of us murderers, KJ Charles. Gothic (set almost entirely in Lackaday House, a great name), dodgy family, and murder. Zev is summonsed back to his estranged family only to discover that not only is his former lover, Gideon, now working there, but his cousin Wynn has decided that whichever potential heir marries his young ward will inherit everything; chaos and murder ensue, the house is cut-off by fog (it’s on the moors) and tension mounts. It is perhaps unfair to Charles that any books she writes set largely in a single country house will mainly make me pine wistfully for Think of England, and yet it’s unavoidable; this was okay but in no danger of displacing the earlier book’s hold on me. The writing for our modern sensibilities is a little too evident here (of course the evil ancestor made his pile in the slave trade and of course Zev would then totally repudiate it) , and after the initial set-up I really wanted more tension between the leads. But I still galloped through this.

Never flinch, Stephen King. Holly reluctantly takes up a job bodyguarding a controversial women’s rights figure; meanwhile, someone upset with the outcome of a recent (rigged) court case is killing innocents in the place of the misled jurors. This is entirely thriller, with no supernatural elements that I spotted, and while King is as always excellent on building tension, the book itself doesn’t really work. King says as much in his afterword, where Tabitha told him the first draft didn’t work, and he went back over and over, but was also working on it during hip issues and eventually decided it was good enough. It’s still a competent thriller but it does feel like it was set up for the (admittedly great!) moment where two separately motivated killers scrap over the same victim - the set up looks increasingly rickety the more you stare into it. I still like Holly, but I don’t think I’ll hang on to this one.

Appassionata, Jilly Cooper. I am much fonder of horses than of classical music but this and Polo are still my most favourite Coopers. Starts with Rupert and Taggie in Bogota, where they’ve gone to adopt a baby as Rupert’s too old for them to adopt in the UK (Rupert, still blindingly awful much of the time but once again I will grudgingly admit he has his moments (I think it’s in Rivals that he (as an MP) suddenly votes against the Tory party line on capital punishment and finds himself with all the liberals), is forced to help out at the orphanage to prove his parenting skills and falls for an abandoned disfigured boy that is not the sweetly pretty baby the nuns have picked out for them; they end up adopting both), and then cheerfully charges into the world of classical music via Abby Rosen, a highly strung American violinist who is being exploited and manipulated by her dodgy agent. Abby is also terrible - she’s impulsive, she fails to think about others’ feelings, she bullies people when she’s feeling insecure - but she is compelling and believable, talented, works incredibly hard most of the time (first as a violinist and then, due to events, as a conductor, fighting prejudice and rebellious musicians), and it’s impossible not to feel for her - and she’s only one of an expansive cast. Also has an m/m romance as one of the main three romantic arcs (featuring Marcus Campbell-Black, Rupert’s oldest son, a brilliant pianist, massively lacking in confidence and closeted, terrified that his father will disown him) but many, many more. She is great at having people be self-obsessed, even cruel, and yet also capable of compassion and growth. And I have no ability to assess Cooper’s writing about music but it genuinely makes me want to listen to the pieces her musicians perform in the hope I’ll share her emotional experience.

One day everyone will have always been against this, Omar El Akkad. Part memoir, part indictment of the West and its unobserved idealism, part witness; it’s good and I am glad I read it but it only made me feel worse about humanity.

Unwritten rules, KD Casey. Once again I bravely ford into the uncharted waters of m/m sports romances that are not about hockey. Second-chance baseball romance by someone who obviously loves baseball; this has a lot of good stuff in it (such as interesting, well-thought out characters, who actually feel like sports athletes - there’s good cultural representation, with one hearing impaired Jewish lead and one first gen Venezuelan) but the balance between their first relationship/breakup and the get back together felt too heavy on the past. I have got her other two on hold.

comments

Books read, September

2025-11-11T20:19:09Z

I forgot to put a divider between September and October in my highly technical & detailed booklog (an enote I stick titles in) so have just put half the books in each.

Horse trouble, Kristin Varner (graphic novel). 12 year old Kate loves horses and riding, but everything else - the mean girls at the stable, her concerns around puberty and body image, her brother’s creepy friends etc - isn’t going so well. And then she starts falling off her horse - is riding also not going to work out for her, or can she find a way through this? This is fine and I like the horse stuff but the rest of it is all a bit similar to other middle grade graphic novels I’ve read recently, which is probably the point but I need some variety.

The unlikely doctor: from gang life and prison to becoming a doctor at 56, Timoti Te Moke. I left in the subtitle because it provides a useful summary. Timoti spent the first six years of his life with loving grandparents - then his mother (and new, abusive, stepfather) took him back, and everything fell apart. Crime, state care, prison, gangs, here and in Australia - and then, in his 30s, he decides to take another path, and starts training as a paramedic, only to end up charged with manslaughter four months out from the end of his course. Timoti comes through as thoughtful, passionate, and surprisingly unresentful. There’s a ghostwriter credited, and they’ve done an excellent job, although it is a tiny bit annoying because it means there probably won’t be another book.

Can I steal you for a second, Jodi McAlister
Here for the right reasons, Jodi McAlister
Not here to make friends, Jodi McAlister

These are a trilogy set during the filming of a (fictional) Bachelor-style reality TV show, Marry Me Juliet, filming in Australia during the pandemic, written by an academic who specialises in romance fiction. I actually started with the second one because I picked it off the GLBTQ section of the local romance bookshop, and was quite some way into it before finally being baffled enough by the references to another couple to check - all three books do, however, cover the same time period (and only the middle one is same sex). Chronologically - in Here for the Right Reasons, Cece, an ex-foster kid who’s just lost her job, sees the show as her only possible chance- but then gets eliminated in the first episode. Due to lockdown, however, all the eliminated contestants are being kept on site, and Cece ends up spending time with Dylan, the show’s Romeo. He’s aware of her situation, and pitches a friendship arc to the show’s producers to get her more exposure - but are they able to stay friends, or do they want something more? Can I Steal You for a Second - Mandie signs up for the show to get over her toxic ex, but lies about that ex being female (she’s bi) to avoid the hassle that would go with being publicly out. And she’s doing well, but while she likes the show’s Romeo, it’s one of the other female contestants (also helpfully called Dylan) whom she’s really attracted to… Not Here to Make Friends has Lily Fireball, the season villain (she shoves Cece into a pond in the opening episode) revealed as a plant, and one with a complex history with Murray, the show runner - can they sort themselves out and save the show? I liked these while never being entirely swept away by any of the leads.

Heroines on horseback, Jane Badger. Nonfiction about the history of horse books, from the early books that were all about the horses themselves as characters (Black Beauty etc) through to the golden days of the Pullein-Thompsons et al and onwards. I have read quite a lot of horse books but do have some odd blind spots (I have never systematically tackled the Jill books and have only read the first three Jinnys despite really liking them) so it’s nice to catch up with some old faves and get nudged into trying some new. Badger is publishing horse books as well, and I’m currently dithering over acquiring a Caroline Akrill adult novel that sounds v Jilly Cooperish (Akrill has a really compelling style and a fondness for bonkers characters, but her het romance elements haven't worked for me, whereas Cooper’s often - suprisingly - do).

Katabasis, RF Kuang. I guess this is the Kuang I’ve least disliked so far? However this is partly because I consistently revise my expectations of her books downwards, so should not be perceived as an endorsement. Once again Kuang has an intriguing set up - Alice Law is at magical college, desperate to do well, but a mistake preparing a working for her exploitative genius professor kills him and leaves her in need of a supervisor’s endorsement, so she goes to Hell to get him back, helped/hindered by Peter, her rival for academic glories with a mysterious and frankly baffling secret - and falls apart on the execution. There are some nice moments in Hell and a secondary character (another academic) I quite liked, but meh.

What did you eat yesterday doujinshi 1-7, Fumi Yoshinaga. I don’t know why it never occurred to me earlier to look for these (there are more but they got ahead of where I am in the series). Explicit content for her more sedate series , which has always very firmly kept the bedroom door closed. I liked that Shiro and Kenji are not entirely sexually compatible (Shiro really wants to be more dominated while Kenji feels guilty for being too pushy/selfish) and that, as with the series, it’s a portrait of a relationship over time.

Dogsbody, Diana Wynne Jones (re-read). Sirius, a powerful luminary, is banished to Earth in the body of a dog after he is convicted of the death of another luminary, something he knows he didn’t do. He is almost killed immediately when someone sticks his litter of puppies into a sack and tosses them into the canal, but survives and is adopted by Kathleen, the unwanted Irish relation living with a family who range from indifferent to actively cruel after her father was imprisoned. As usual with DWJ I forget how bleak her endings are until I run head-on into them - this one, in particular, is painful because Sirius is mostly triumphant and only dimly aware that it isn’t the same for everyone else concerned.

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Books read, August

2025-10-28T21:28:48Z

What did I spend August doing instead of reading? Writing, mostly.

Play date, Alex Dahl. Elisa lets her daughter Lucia have a play date and spend the night with a new classmate - but Lucia isn’t returned in the morning, and when Elisa goes to the house where she dropped Lucia off, it’s a rental being cleaned out and there’s no trace of the people she met. Who has taken her? Why? Will they ever find her etc etc. I liked that this was set in Scandinavia but otherwise it’s pretty clunky and the twists are irritating.

Love in the afternoon, Lisa Kleypas. Cyrano de Bergerac style het historical romance. Quirky nature-loving Beatrix takes over writing back to the dashing soldier Christopher when her much sought after friend Prudence can’t be bothered - and, as war takes its toll on Christopher, the letters grow more intimate. He comes back intending to marry the woman he’s fallen in love with, but Prudence seems fonder of the decorated war hero than the man who wrote the letters… This was okay. I liked what Kleypas was doing with Christopher’s PTSD but it didn’t always mesh with the romance, and Beatrix is both super certain of herself and yet determined not to tell Christopher who she is. There’s a great dog in it, though.

Slugfest, Gordon Korman. Yash is a fantastic athlete but unfortunately the fact that his middle school has been sending him to play on high school teams comes back to bite him when he doesn’t have the state-mandated PE credit for 8th grade. He’s sent to the summer school PE program, which is nicknamed Slugfest because it’s usually populated by non athletic losers - can they all come together as a team? Multi pov, and a satisfying story with just enough surprise to keep things interesting. Not one of my all time Korman faves but I can see myself re-reading this sometime.

Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons. I went along to the first meeting of a local book group in a spirit of enquiry, which was serially dashed by a) the person who said she didn’t want to analyse books like we did at school and probably half an hour of book talk would be enough, after which we could talk about things like what Netflix series we are all watching b) the person who said she reads five books a week but ONLY real books not those e ones and only motorcycle club het romance, fostering stories and cosy mysteries c) the person who said she’s written a book, it’s amusing things her children have said interspersed with parenting tips and she’ll bring us all a copy next time d) everybody in their introductions except me saying they didn’t like sf/fantasy (we’d been told to bring a book we’d recently enjoyed and I was waving around my e copy of Black Water Sister) and e) the person who was telling one end of the table about how her teenage daughter had decided she was trans and now wouldn’t talk to her and how unreasonable this is.

Despite this really rather appalling start, there were two other people there I vaguely knew & liked, and one of them seemed to be capable of talking about books. One of the more organised people there came up with a choice of three possible books to read for each meeting, and although I missed the next one due to other commitments I decided rather belatedly to go back at least once more, which meant I ended up having an afternoon to read either Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster. I have largely avoided Faulkner apart from a few short stories and saw no reason to change this, so I borrowed the other two from the library and started on Tom Lake. I think Patchett is a great prose writer who writes books I don’t like - I was not wild about Commonwealth - and although I enjoyed the opening few chapters of the process of casting for a production of Our Town once I realised the book set up was going to be mother tells daughters about her past fling with now famous Hollywood actor I was almost entirely disengaged.

So I read Ellen Foster, which is about a poor white girl growing up in the American South in (probably) the 1970s, whose father is abusive, whose mother overdoses and dies, who has a Black friend (Starletta) to whom she is racist, etc, etc, etc, all told in non standard English. It’s readable and Ellen’s voice works well, and it isn’t as unrelentingly miserable as I’ve made out, but it ’s in a weird space book-wise where I’d probably rather either have a memoir or something explicitly fiction (as I’m typing this, what I really want to do is re-read the Tillerman series by Cynthia Voigt). One other person at the follow up meeting had read it and hadn’t loved it (two of them had read Tom Lake, the motorcycle foster cosy person hadn’t been able to bring herself to leave her comfort zone, another person was immured in Lucinda Riley’s Sister series, and everyone else cancelled at the last minute). Will I go again? Hmm.

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Yuletide

2025-10-24T02:21:05Z

Dear Yuletide writer,

I love Yuletide, as a challenge, a community and a tradition. I am thrilled to see what you come up with and I hope you enjoy creating it.

What I like hasn't changed much from previous years (including this sentence, its time come round again, slouching towards AO3 etc). I like humour that cares about the characters. I like characters who are outsiders in some way, but (sometimes even despite themselves!) become part of something larger - a relationship, a cause, a community. I like food as a way of showing character or worldbuilding (and for eating!). I like bittersweet endings. I like justified angst, pining, weirdness, and invention. I like pretty much any style of writing - epistolary, experimental, Dickensian - and even second person, if it works for the story. In a previous year I got IF for one story and that was fantastic. Artwise, I like quiet moments, possibly with tea or food, and prefer stylised to photorealistic. I love treats.

I have no problem with sexual content as long as it fits with the characters. I like stories that make me remember why I love the original inspiration as well as stories that make me think about it differently (and both! both is great). And I do like the canons themselves. I like these characters being part of their worlds, even when they struggle against them.

With my noms this year I am happy with crossovers (with other noms or any fandoms I've written). For AUs see specific fandoms. If you’re looking for short fandoms, either Dogsbody (one short book) or Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (one average movie) would suit.

DNWs: child or animal harm &/or death as a major plot point (outside of canon). If you’re looking back through old letters I have previously excluded earthquakes but it’s been over ten years and now I’m okay with them but would like them tagged. No noncanonical trans characters, please (exception for Jumanji - see below).

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Sheldon ("Shelly") Oberon
Jefferson (“Seaplane”) McDonough

I loved this so much, and it was so unexpected - I loved the van Allsburg book, really liked the Robin Williams film while being a bit disoriented about the undoing of the past, and went into this expecting it to be a bit of a let-down, and it was great. Everybody really leaned into the gaming aspects, NPC briefings, strengths/weaknesses, limited lives, and all, and this time the undoing of the past is actually heartbreaking in its consequence for Bethany as Shelly, and her/his relationship with Jefferson (I ship them in game but not in real life).

I've nominated the real world and game versions, but I'm much more interested in the experience in-game than in the real world. For this request I'd like to ignore The Next Level (although references to it welcome!), but apart from that, anything and everything goes. A sidequest within canon? AU where they don't make it past one of the challenges and have to find another way out? Another trip back into the game, just the two of them? Go wild.

I've put no non-canonical trans characters in my DNWs but for this fandom I am happy to have either/both (or anyone else) as trans.

Worrals series - WE Johns

Betty "Frecks" Lovell (Worrals Series - W. E. Johns)
Joan "Worrals" Worralson (Worrals Series - W. E. Johns)

So fantastic! So action-filled, with so many sudden reversals - and Worrals & Frecks are great, competent and brave, but never over-confident or perfect. I would love more adventures and I would also love femslash, h/c, spies, plane dogfights/crashes, coping with being in some form of wilderness after a plane crash, space AUs, or even just a quiet moment between the two of them in-between adventures. I like spies and betrayal and working with the Resistance, if you're looking for WWII themes, I would prefer the Nazis to not be massively emphasised and obviously I know that horrible things happened to British agents in reality but would prefer the narrow escapes and last-minute dashes of these books. I also love the plane bits and know almost nothing about planes so feel free to invent things.

I’ve read the first few non WWII ones (which unfortunately do have some terrible racial bits). I do have a slight preference for keeping the war setting BUT I am also totally up for leaping forward 10 years or more to see what the two of them are like. More spying? Test piloting? Involvement in the space program? Go for it. AUs of any kind fine as long as it's still them and there's danger and determination in bucketloads.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl)
Katia Grim
Princess Donut (Dungeon Crawler Carl)

I totally love this series, the world and the characters (I have read all seven books as well as listening to the audiobooks). Such a great concept, carried through with ruthless elan and with unexpected depths of feeling and insight. I love Carl, who is trying so hard despite everything being so stacked against him, and how he teeters between his goals and their costs. I love Princess Donut, who is very much a cat despite everything, and Katia, who has grown so much (ha!) during her time in the dungeon. I love the gamelit/RPG tropes (loot boxes! stat increases!) and the horror tropes and the pokes at reality TV. I love that everyone has their own agenda (look at Donut, running a revolution in her spare time) and I really, really love the way that Carl, even as he blows everything up and gets increasingly unstable, can listen to others, respect their opinions, and give them chances to make their own paths.

Prompts - go wild. Carl or Katia’s past, before they go into the dungeon? (Or Donut’s - what was she like as a kitten? What was her take on Carl when he first showed up?) A bit from Mordecai’s crawl? An outsider pov from a fan, an NPC, or another top ten crawler? Another convention appearance? An AU - feel free to design your own floor!! - or an outtake? What if, when they’d ended up in the Ghosts of Earth section, they’d been in a different area, or they’d lost their memories and thought they were back? What if they find themselves (apparently) outside the dungeon?

I do not ship any of the nominated characters - one of the things I like about DCC is that Carl hasn't had any sexual relationships since entering the dungeon. Canonical relationships (Katia/Bautista and I SUPPOSE Donut/Gravy Boat) are fine but I don't really want them to be the focus.

Feel free to play with formats. Please don't permanently kill any of the requested characters but otherwise darkness consistent with canon is fine. I am fine with gore. AUs - tbh you could probably do a terrifying coffee shop AU with this group and I would love it, as long as I still recognise the characters, but no American high school AUs, please.

Dogsbody, Diana Wynne Jones

Kathleen O’Brien
Sirius (Dogsbody)
Sol (Dogsbody)

I recently re-read this and it’s so good and so heart-breaking - DWJ is just the best at devastating endings, and this one, where Sirius hasn’t quite realised what his victory means, even while Kathleen struggles with yet another horrific loss, is still reverberating through me. I would love to read more. Does Kathleen meet Sirius again, or even end up becoming his companion - how, and what does that mean for her ties to Earth? What about Sol, who has previously avoided politics, and how do he and Earth feel about the loss of the Hunter? And Sirius, who has changed so much and come so far - what does he do now? And does he miss being a dog? I would be fine with canon AUs (perhaps a different bargain with the Wild Hunt) but am not looking for major setting/theme AUs, and it doesn’t have to end happily - but I do want more.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R Donaldson

Linden Avery

Linden Avery was hugely important to me in my teens, when there weren't a lot of adult females in sf/fantasy I could see myself in. I still love her as well as what the Second Chronicles do with portal fantasy, which was fascinating and heart-breaking all in one, while Thomas himself is much more of an ambivalent reading experience. I have read only the first two of the third and am not yet convinced by them.

I would like; more Linden! On Earth or visiting the Land, and I'm happy to ignore the third series or go AU from the second if you have a better idea. What if she’d gone to the Land first, instead of Covenant? What if someone from the Land comes to visit her world? I do like the third chronicles' idea of time-travelling within the Land's history, if you wanted to do that, and would love exploring more of the Land anyway. I also wonder how Linden reconciles her experiences with her everyday life on returning to our world, especially her healthsense given her job, and I'd like to see her finding some peace or happiness there, having healed from her past. I would also be interested to see Linden crossing into other fantasy worlds (for the Yuletide eligible, anything from Diana Wynne Jones or Piranesi).

I understand Covenant himself isn't everyone's cup of tea, and I haven't nominated him. I don't have strong feelings about him showing up or not; he is important to Linden, but not essential. I don’t mind either of the other nominated characters showing up; if you don't mind non-nominated, I have a weakness for Nom the Sandgorgon.

England series - KJ Charles

Archie Curtis (England series)
Daniel da Silva (England Series - KJC)
Fenella Carruth
Patricia Merton

My favourite KJC, and the one I am most likely to accidentally end up re-reading after just looking up one thing. I love everyone in these books (well, certainly all the nominated characters) - I love Archie’s reliability and Daniel’s spark, and Fenella’s well-concealed practical ruthlessness and Patricia’s determination. They’re all fantastic! I would be equally happy with slice of life or case fic, isolated country houses or London city life, supernatural AUs or inexplicably having everyone in space. I don’t want anyone to break up and I also don’t want any weddings, but otherwise I would be delighted by any and everything you can come up with.

Thanks so much!!

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Books read, June

2025-10-01T00:22:00Z

Everything that’s not Murderbot, as I also read all the rest of the extant Murderbot corpus this month. Favourites - All the Beauty in the World for new to me, Longshot for re-read, and Cat Man for manga/graphic novel.

Longshot, Dick Francis (re-read)
The Salt Path, Raynor Winn
The Wild Silence, Raynor Winn
Landlines, Raynor Winn
Bean There, Found You, Cameron Tate
A dim prognosis: our health system in crisis - and a doctor’s view on how to fix it, Ivor Popovitch
Bonds of brass, Emily Skrutskie
Invisible, Christina Diaz Gonzalez & Gabriela Epstein
Grave expectations, Alice Bell (re-read)
Turning 12, Kathryn Ormsbee & Molly Brooks
All the beauty in the world: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, Patrick Bingley
Cat Man, Parari
She loves to cook and she loves to eat, Sakaomi Yuzaki, v 5
My darling dreadful thing, Johanna van Veen

( Cut for length. )

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Gaming Update

2025-09-17T02:49:53Z

I determinedly managed to get through the Master level of Astro Bot, and then after several hundred attempts got the Sephibot from the Megamix Mastery challenge, yay. To get Sephiroth you have to get through three challenges using the dog (which is like a rocket boost), the monkey (plays cymbals that change orientation/direction of various obstacles) and the chicken (launches you upwards), and what I particularly enjoyed was that once you’ve made it to the chicken bit, which is the final one, the bouncy fast-paced Astro Bot music starts to merge with One-Winged Angel, Sephiroth’s iconic theme :D Anyway, he is now mine! I then gritted my teeth and watched some YouTube playthroughs for help and FINALLY got the last two bots from the speed rounds (inflatable octopus my nemesis, I have at last successfully wrangled you) so have now 100%’d everything until more DLC comes out.

Played a bit more of Death Stranding, and I do like it, but it hasn’t really gripped me yet - it wants me to seek out another settlement, but then I keep getting local missions, and I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to level up first and there’s no apparent time tension. I therefore picked up Stardew Valley again, which is probably my worst game every for making me play “just one more day” and am now on summer in year 3, have finally managed to marry a villager (Elliot, who has conveniently added a library wing to my house, why no I am sure my character likes him for his personality) and unlock Qi’s challenges on Ginger Island.

And then I picked up FFVII Remake thinking vaguely about doing a hard mode play through, but couldn’t find that or chapter select as an option so have now played through most of 17 chapters all over again (there are only 18 chapters) and gosh I love everyone in this (almost; obviously I do not love Hojo or most of Shinra, including the Turks). I am significantly better at fighting now as well, although I forgot everyone’s level 2 limit break was locked behind their colosseum fights but you can only see the options for characters in your party, so Tifa and Barrett are still stuck on level 1 because I didn’t take them back there once I had them.

The sheer density of boss fights towards the end and the lack of ability to save in between phases is a pain. In chapter 17 I beat Jenova Lifebringer easily enough as a team battle (now that I know to take out the tentacles), fought Rufus and his blasted alien hound solo on the roof top (I can take out the dog easily enough but getting Rufus means you have to hit him with Braver when he reloads, and he is super fast and keeps shooting me so I end up running in circles around the roof top for AGES self-healing until I can make it work), and then went into a fight against the Arsenal (not the football team) with Barrett and Aerith that I lost in the second to last phase - so I left the game on pause to wrangle children, organise household etc and when I went back I had to fight Rufus and Darkstar all over again, arrgh.

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Books read, May

2025-09-09T21:52:59Z

I didn’t read much this month but What Did You Eat Yesterday is just delightful and I will happily wallow in it for days.

Copper script, KJ Charles
What did you eat yesterday, 5-21, Fumi Yoshinaga
Ordeal by innocence, Agatha Christie
The examiner, Janice Hallett
Artificial conditon, Martha Wells
Invisible boys, Holden Sheppard

Copper Script, KJ Charles. Post-WWI London, detective sergeant Aaron Fowler agrees to investigate someone who claims they can read people’s characters from their handwriting after his rather dodgy cousin is dumped by his fiancée on this evidence, and becomes hopelessly entangled with the graphologist, Wildsmith, as they fall in love and solve crimes. It’s perfectly competent but didn’t get me any deeper than superficial enjoyment at the progressive ticking off of plot and relationship beats. I wasn’t really in the mood for either a cop hero or graphology as for-real mindreading though.

What did you eat yesterday, 5-21. Fumi Yoshinaga. These have been stacking up on my shelves and I finally caught up with reading them all - I think 5-8 were re-reads and then it was all new. This slice-of-life domestic cooking manga follows closeted lawyer Shiro (who does most of the cooking and is obsessed with frugality with a side of fat-shaming, which didn’t bother me because it feels so internalised but other readers may differ) and his partner Kenji (cheerful gossipy hairdresser, gives great specific compliments on the food) and their social circle through in real time, so the characters start in their early forties and are now in their fifties. I just love the art and the observation and the food and the way Yoshinaga can do so much in just a few panels, and the fact that the time frame means that what conflicts and problems there are (such as Shiro’s parents allowing him to bring Kenji to one family New Year’s celebration but then telling him not to do it again) can play out over months or even years. It is definitely a different generation to She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat, in terms of expectations and identity, as well as broader cultural referents like social media, but I love them both. I have made a few recipes from this series and they’ve all turned out well, as well. I keep meaning to track down the TV series but I usually only watch about one TV series per year and unexpectedly this year it seems to be The Pitt, so that will have to wait.

Ordeal by Innocence, Agatha Christie. I’m not sure if I’ve read this one before. A man able to provide the person convicted of murder with an impeccable alibi finally shows up two years after the crime. The convicted suspect is dead, and the family and friends remaining are not at all grateful for this new information - not least because it means that one of them is the killer. The concept is great and as usual it's a well-handled mystery, although does stack up the bodies a bit (my parents used to watch this Scottish police drama called Taggart when I was small, and it usually became easier to work out who'd done it with each episode as more and more suspects turned up dead).

The Examiner, Janice Hallett. Another in her series of found document murder mysteries (a series in terms of format, not recurring characters), this one follows a group of students in their year at a multimedia art master’s program; as they await the approval of the final external examiner, it becomes apparent that one of them may have been murdered. This is very readable and it has some nice moments, plus I enjoyed the art masters concept, but it gets less likely as it progresses, one of the twists felt a little mean-spirited and the final revelations more contrived than inevitable.

Artificial Condition, Martha Wells. Will end up reviewing with the other Murderbots.

Invisible Boys, Holden Sheppard. Gay male teens struggling with their sexuality in small town western Australia; nothing goes particularly well. It’s well done for what it is but the female characters are short-changed and the three male narrators can be hard to distinguish at times. Reinforces my desire to stay in cities.

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Books read, April

2025-09-03T01:55:49Z

Favourites for this month were Black Water Sister and The Library at Mount Char, plus for sheer prose quality A Diary without Dates.

A diary without dates, Enid Bagnold
The Lord of Stariel, AJ Lancaster
The library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins
Home truths, Charity Norman
Fast connection, Megan Erickson
The friend zone experiment, Zen Cho
Careless people, Sarah Wynn-Williams
A month in the country, JL Carr
Cat gamer 7, Water Nadatani
Dinosaurs sanctuary 6, Itaru Kinoshita
My year in the middle, Lila Quintero Weaver
The shots you take, Rachel Reid
A rake of his own, AJ Lancaster
The husband, Dean Koontz
All systems red, Martha Wells
The Venice hotel, Tess Woods
Life among the savages, Shirley Jackson (re-read)
Black water sister, Zen Cho
The song machine, John Seabrook
The body in the blitz, Robin Stevens

( I've stuck them under here rather than clutter up everyone's reading page. )

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