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this was generally queer fun and i didn't have to think too hard, which i appreciated, because i'm going to have to turn on my megabrain to tackle the titles i've lined up next. i found myself not really questioning the setup or logistics aside from when does august actually go to class, which i think is a net positive for the book? i actually thought it'd be a much hornier read but i guess there was a mystery (or two) to solve and there's only so much you can do with fucking on the subway.

i mostly read this around the midnight hour on select nights, except for the final push, which took place late weekday morning after i'd remote worked for a bit. kinda fit the late-night Q train rides in the story.

(7/17/2023) fantastic showing from one half of the ostertag/stevenson power duo. i flipped through a few pages at the library and was initially thinking based on the art style, teen characters, and illustrated group text exchanges that it'd be a tad too YA for my tastes (if there even is such a thing), but the group texts ended up being a clever storytelling device that both marked the passage of time and evolving relationships between the characters, and the dialogue was full of personality throughout without being a) written by an adult tryharding how teenagers talk or b) way too specific with slang or references to be relevant in a few years. also there are many cute gay kisses.

(7/1/2023) a quick read, but it didn't feel rushed. wish we could have spent more time with the characters, but it was pleasing in a wrapped-up short film kinda way. the art was cool, the banter was good. worldbuilding could have gone a bit deeper, but if we think of it as a small package maybe it was just enough? undecided.

if you liked these, you'll like this: disney's mulan (1998), monstrous regiment by terry pratchett, and the legend of the condor heroes franchise (teenage me was mildly obsessed with one of the television adaptations and even accumulated most if not all of the manhua volumes, even though to this day i still haven't read either the wuxia novel or the manhua, oops). anything with a roving band of bantering adventurers in wartime, really, but especially if loyalties aren't straightforward.

this novella came up as a passing mention in book club a little while back, and now that i've read it, i'm compelled to hunt down more of zen cho's works. maybe spirits abroad, first, then black water sister? (after i make my way through my current library stack.)

stray thoughts:

• it baffles me how anyone could think this took place in tang dynasty china (per a zen cho interview in locus). even if it's got fantasy elements, it's very specifically southeast asian.
• i meant to write a bit about the english translation for the night of baba yaga and how i thought sam bett did a good job of deciding what to translate, what to put in romaji, and what to give footnotes for, but even though this wasn't translated, i had similar thoughts about the use of malay phrases (and some sentence structure quirks in dialogue) throughout. i had google in my pocket, but most meanings i could pick up from context. not all writers do this well, so i wanted to make note of it.
• it was a quick and relatively easy read, but i still kept going over the same paragraphs again and again, brain empty. not sure what to make of that.
• like my previous read, this is definitely queer but i really hesitate to drill down more or call any character this or that. i'm cringing at some goodreads reviews that assign identities to some of the cast; god forbid we have nuance or context?

i was gonna come here and lament that the ending felt unresolved, but goodreads just informed me there's at least one other book after this. this moves super fast! lots of old-timey action! i didn't feel too personally bought into the stakes, but it was a fun little escape and i liked the worldbuilding. also lisa is very cool.

(7/18/2023) i guess i'm in the mood for graphic memoirs by same-gen creators lately or something? this was fascinating to read mostly because i've seen bits and pieces of ND stevenson's art (and followed multiple projects of his) over the period of time this memoir covers (2009-2019 – and visually 2011-2019) and we were simultaneously on tumblr. i laughed when i saw the very brief pokeymans reference because i remember that unfolding in real time. well, i laughed internally (i was in a library).

i kinda feel like it makes sense to read pageboy next if i'm gonna continue on this theme of reading memoirs by trans and queer creators who are roughly my age. i will say, though, that while yes this book covered a decade and was full of various autobiographical drawings it felt more like, witnessing stevenson's creativity unfold over time in small, encapsulated moments. feels rude to say it wasn't as deep as i'd hoped because like, this is a person's life.

the mid-2010s playlist from the book:

1. riptide (taylor swift version) https://youtu.be/6wyYucOEqV8
2. arctic monkeys - do i wanna know?
3. john-allison weiss - don't go
4. CHVRCHES - keep you on my side
5. the cure - friday i'm in love
6. john-allison weiss - wait for me
7. brandi carlile - wherever is your heart

i'm writing this immediately after finishing the book, right at my no-more-renewals library due date, so i might feel differently after it's had time to settle (like what does/will dekakel onchu do after all that? is that a loose thread or not?), but right now: the story's conclusion was satisfying and hit all the right notes for me. it felt like closing a window, conclusive, final, but the universe would go on beyond it. i wasn't sure i'd like the eight antidote POV sections at first (i thought they'd fall somewhere between being very young but not in expected mannerisms, à la ender's game, and adult-writing-a-child) but they and the rotating POVs grew on me. i think a minor gripe was just that sometimes the text would progress entirely chronologically between characters and sometimes a POV switch would take you back in time to experience the same scene from another angle. and the we POVs were a bit purposefully opaque. besides some of the more blunt characters (like sixteen moonrise), i also lost track of some characters' political ties and motivations over time; there were so many different approaches to conflict and i wasn't ever 100% sure i was remembering certain details correctly. at the same time, though, that nuance was fun and the discontinuity human.

the romance was overall sweet, and i thought left off in a good, realistic way. reminded me a bit of the abyss surrounds us in terms of power dynamics, but much less harsh (that one had pirates and their prisoners and a toxic hate-love situation) while simultaneously being much more full of microaggressions that were alluded to but not addressed head-on between the characters. like even when they were fighting about it they weren't, and apologies happened through intent only. some steamy stuff happens though. a memory called empire took place over what, a week? this one, less than? hard to say, but either way my girl three seagrass was down bad.

my page 444 status update was me having my mind blown. how wide is the concept of “you”? except now i see “the world, the empire” in the status update got annihilated because it was between yskandr-voice angle brackets and goodreads didn't like it. that's hilarious.

i also read this via a combination of hardcover, ebook, and audiobook while at home and on the road. the audiobook properly served its purpose of injecting the book into my earholes, but even after i got used to the narrator i found the speech patterns chosen for mahit dzmare and three seagrass incongruous with what i imagined for them, and especially so after three seagrass is described as having a clear alto voice in chapters eleven and fifteen. via audiobook, she comes across as too high-pitched, girlish, and whiny to me, rather than the kind of steady poet, diplomat, and orator i imagined her to be. the scenes in which neither character spoke were much more tolerable.

book club book that i'm gonna chase with a different book club book where the book club meeting on the book has already happened but i haven't yet returned the book to the library

anyway: artistically and format-wise, this was brilliant. took me back to my very queer memoir class back in senior year of college; similar names arising from past academia, use of erotica, cycling through genres. if it's still being taught, i wonder if this title is now on the syllabus.

time travel stuff is notoriously difficult to do well but i think the authors managed to craft something pretty intriguing and satisfying. this makes me want to write letters again. however, i would've rated the book higher if the time we spent with each character (outside of correspondence) weren't so... vague. like, i had a general sense of the nature of each agency, and how their agents operate, but it was more like i was letting the book's atmosphere lazily haze around me than being fully engrossed in the descriptions or actions, some of which was overly metaphorical and more alien than relatable anyway. it's probably best to just describe this as a tender exchange of letters because i don't think the rest will really stick with me if i don't summarize it in this review.

i read this via a combination of hardcover, ebook, and audiobook while at home and on the road. it was a bit tough to get rolling but once i got used to the style (and the plot stakes were higher) things pretty much cruised along through to the end. and i had a guess about something at the beginning that turned out to be right, so that was pleasing.

giving this five stars because it is very much a title i would acquire for my otherwise very minimal hard copy collection, i'm excited to bundle up and walk to my little village library and read its sequel, and because i didn't think i would like a space politics book if it weren't for the personalities and sass in a second language. makes me want to rewatch the expanse (which i watched all of) and altered carbon (which i watched most of one season of). and also, the buffy episode with willow and tara's first onscreen kiss, because there is very much a sort of “mad reaching-out for comfort” (440), tender desperation throughout the book that i quite enjoyed.

ngl, this really didn't grab me at first. a lot of the first half of the book felt fairly superficial to me, a little too “yeah, i'm reading a YA novel.” it wasn't until the second half that things started to pick up and various cultural references started to feel a lot more nuanced and real/experienced, rather than what felt like throwaway details (the kind a white author might sprinkle in here and there for minimal-effort diversity points—not that that was the case here, but it felt reminiscent of it).

overall: a fun story to follow! but would i keep a copy on my shelf? probably not. i wanted joan to have a lot more personality, more punch to contrast with elsie's naivete and tunnel vision. ada and ritika felt a lot more fully formed. i can think of about two places where i liked that joan was giving elsie noticeable pushback; one was on page 138, “you definitely said time on your own.” / “maybe i did, but i know what i meant.”

i guess i've been on kind of a memoir streak lately so i should have known what i was getting myself into, but i was still both wholly unprepared to read this and also unprepared for the amazing level of empathy kate beaton has despite/through it all. the afterword is really good, don't skip. it got me choked up.

i met KB very briefly in early 2012 at a topatoco tag sale, where she drew a stunning portrait of me inside my copy of hark! a vagrant. i stopped my daily webcomics rotation sometime after that, but i still feel some type of way about witnessing those very same panels (and that pony) being created in the background of the memoir, like i'm peeking behind the curtain or finding out how a hot dog gets made.

thought back to this federico fellini quote used in anatomy of comics, which i saw posted to bluesky out of context a few days before i started reading ducks:

Comics create a spectral fascination. Their paper characters and forever frozen situations are like motionless puppets with no strings attached. This cannot be transferred to cinema, whose seduction comes from movement, rhythm, and dynamics. It's a radically different style and way of expressing oneself. A different way of communicating, and influencing the gaze. The world of comics can generously lend cinema its scenarios, characters, stories. But it will not have this ineffable and secret power of suggestion which comes from the transfixed immobility of a pinned butterfly.

(7/4/2023) this was way less queer than i thought it would be, which is not necessarily a bad thing! it's an interesting examination of the author's relationship to femininity and “girlhood” and the gender binary while growing up, but while it touches on feeling uncomfortable in your body and wanting to be a boy because boys got to do cooler stuff it does deviate from the “typical” trans narrative in a way that's closer to my own experience.

i somehow ended up simultaneously reading two books by debut authors about bi, viet american teenage girls visiting vietnam (the other being she is a haunting) and i think maybe i shouldn't have because i started to get small details mixed up between the two titles despite the different genres. there are orchids in front of this house, hydrangeas in front of the other. this mother works long hours in a nail salon, this other mother used to sleep alone in one. loads of food references in both. whoops.

a bánh mì for two is pretty fluffy, maybe a tad saccharine; the book itself has a flowery pink fore-edge design that reflects its vibe. the story ends up basically being a series of cute dates between the MCs, with a premise vaguely tacked on. the surface-level family and culture details are generally fine, but the other ones are fairly thin: lan works her family's bánh mì stand that regularly has long lines that "wrap around the neighborhood," but vivi happens to stop by one morning (four chapters later) and it's slow enough that lan just leaves right then and there (and there's no indication má or triết are also present to hold down the fort, but it's also made a big deal that lan works hard so her mom doesn't have to, and the cart is their whole livelihood, and so on). vivi and cindy somehow end up doing their first semester of college abroad (which is already strange and unusual) but are only ever really stationed at their dorm that's right across from lan's bánh mì cart. they don't go to class, except that one time vivi can't stay out too late because she has "class in the morning" and that other time she supposedly attends courses but can't focus all day. and i have to really squint to accept that vivi ends up in a completely different location for study abroad than she told her parents because in this world, you can avoid alerting them while having them sign a bunch of paperwork, going to the embassy, getting a student visa, and using the same SIM card (i assume)/calling them from abroad without incurring roaming costs. the whole lying subplot i didn't pay too much attention to as a result. am i an overthinking party pooper? why do i do this to YA novels? should i stop reading YA, or have the last bunch i've read just been unrealistic in the name of fiction?

my biggest gripe was how the author seemed to have scenes visualized in her head, but often failed to give stage directions, so the characters became unmoored from their gorgeous surroundings. one second they're having a conversation at the café, the next they're on a motorbike with no transition. vivi fidgets with the spoon. (what spoon? the one in lan's egg coffee?) lan walks into her house sopping wet and dripping puddles everywhere after somehow riding a scooter through knee-high stormwater, then sits on some furniture and flops onto her mattress. (or you do you, i guess.) they take their shoes off on wet concrete on a rooftop and fall sideways onto a presumably dry picnic blanket(?). my editor brain would do this: instead of going straight from dialogue in the café to "i help vivi hop onto my motorbike, our fingers brushing against each other," i'd change it to "when i help vivi hop onto my motorbike, our fingers brush against each other." way less jarring, and a small hint that we've jumped forward in time. i'm not saying i need to have my hand held as a reader to imagine—just try not to give me whiplash.

finally, i really don't know about stuffing nearly all of the book's conflict and reconciliation into the last fifty pages, complete with contrived lovers' quarrel. it was kind of a relief to have the inevitable all out in the open at last, but it felt rushed and over too soon. some pretty big life decisions get made in just a short chapter or two.

i definitely wanted to like this! too bad it was disjointed and hard to follow in parts. my notes above don't even really get into the "major" family arcs/character development. i was somewhat aware things were moving along in a certain direction but the reading experience just felt so scattered.

my final read of 2023! i generally struggle with rating anything, and i'm having trouble with this book in particular because i think the author gets a solid 5/5 for ambition and a very fun idea but 1.5/5 for execution, and other reviews (like @readwithcindy's) have already covered some specifics of what did end up driving me up a wall about the writing style. my status updates for this book are brimming with snark already so i won't revisit those notes in full, but portrait of a thief read both like it was clearly a debut novel and like a mid-tier fic on ao3 where impossible events are waved past with phrases such as “and then, somehow, x happened,” where a sense of finality is peppered throughout on single-sentence paragraphs (“it would have to be enough”), and where overly dramatic rhetorical questions kept coming back: “of course... how could it not?” / “what else was there?” i found myself doing line edits in my head after a while, which was distracting, and i kept repeatedly skimming ahead just to loop back and “actually” read.

and like, i kinda get it! i tried my hand at creative writing once, and i hated writing scenic descriptions, and would have preferred just focusing on dialogue only (maybe i should have tried writing more plays). the dialogue is the most believable part of any chapter here, and i venture the strongest. i loved when characters argued. i could've done without sentences about the sky being blue or gold or red—or rarely, purple like a bruise.

let's talk about suspension of disbelief. this is what i know (heh): there are elements of the story that are grounded in our reality, like college students doing remote learning during the early parts of the ongoing global pandemic (sidenote: it occurred to me that this book has a certain urgency in its favor in 2022, maybe 2023, maybe not much later than that), and then others that are just... not at all. i don't even mean the heists.

while the storytelling medium didn't work well for me (i am intrigued by how this story will eventually turn out on television), i did think this was a well-timed read, and IRL things layered onto what i enjoyed about it: my parents, now both retired, studying civics questions for their upcoming naturalization tests; my uncle turning in the keys to my grandparents' house in beitou that they built fifty years ago so that it can finally be demolished by the city after months of delay; me propping up a hardcover to read in the twin bed that got transported from childhood home to childhood home to the house my parents now own. asking my mom about the meaning behind 拔苗助长 when i saw it on the page and her adjusting the idiom to 揠苗助長. some might call that projection.

2.5 for being somewhere between “it was OK” and “i liked it” but rounded up because there are no half stars on gr and i'm feeling generous.

also, if this weren't a library book and if i dog-eared pages (ew, never), i'd mark chapter 64—even if once i read it more closely i realized the word “gaze” (heh, iykyk) was used at least five times, including “lifted her gaze” at least twice where the character in question hadn't ever looked away to begin with. spoilers, though.

was juggling three books at once (this, space politics, and horny queers fighting zombies) and this was the lightest fare and the narration was fun. (and i don't even like/drink coffee) turns out this homebody really enjoyed the soft, cozy companionship and reno projects. the cast is very sweet and tender 🥹 i wanna be friends with viv and tandri and cal and thimble 🥺 also lol at all the other characters commenting on viv's obliviousness regarding a certain someone.

my media consumption has unintentionally converged: i just recently watched both volumes of kill bill followed by its inspiration lady snowblood, and yakuza 0 is next up on my games backlog (like a dragon, the JRPG title with kasuga, is the only one i've played in the series). so that should give you an idea of the book content: a bloody action thriller, with severed limbs, tons of misogyny and gross sexual violence, but gratifying physical hand-to-hand combat. it's a short read (translated from what i assume is a light novel) and pages go by fast due to the font size and line spacing. the plot probably fits into a 30-minute tv episode; it's compact and deliberate, with not much to trim off.

i don't want to say too much here because i think the less you know the more you'll enjoy the read (if you're OK with the content warnings above), but i was definitely glad i had a library hard copy to easily flip back to earlier pages. the book jacket synopsis also doesn't allude to this format outside of one word that you'll only figure out the meaning of towards the end, but it's dual POV with a wicked cool confluence.

this has a sapphic asian author and it was probably on my radar from some preview list of upcoming queer releases, and one of the marketing blurbs on the back alludes to it being "part poignant queer love story," but i think that's overselling it. the queerness is more... nebulous, understated. it's got certain themes that will make some audiences go 👀 and i think you'll root for the protagonists like you would for sook-hee and hideko in the handmaiden, but it's a far cry from being a gay romance.

hmmm. i felt that the characterization in this was a bit too reliant on marginalized identity=personality without giving us much else. it was akin to how i felt about the cast in brooms.

one star for steamy sex scenes, i guess, even though i'm massively judging wendy's sense of priorities (and unhealthy, eye-rolling obsession with her ex). once the infection stuff started going, the book also began moving pretty fast, so there's that. but the underlying corporate pride (and company spokesperson) stuff seemed a bit too clowny for me even though i wanted the allegory to work.

also i keep fixating on how in a flashback, one character makes a therapy appointment for their partner against their will and drives them to the appointment without any sort of heads up whatsoever to the other person while positioning themself as a savior. that seemed pretty fucked up to me.