“The Widow Queen” by Elzbieta Cherezinska

This is another book that I got for free from Tor.com, and it’s a much longer book than the ones that they usually send out! This is essentially a fictionalized history of Northern Europe, focusing on Norway, Sweden, Poland, and a little of England.

The book follows the two children of a Duke of Poland, the son goes on to be Poland’s first king, and the daughter is married off to the king of Sweden. They also have some half-siblings that the book follows for part of it as well. Importantly, the daughter, Sigrid as she’s called in Sweden, falls in love with Olav who is trying to reclaim the throne of Finland. But they aren’t married and are separated. Sigrid’s husband though then sacrifices himself to Odin, and she ends up having to then marry the king of Norway to keep the peace. It ends after she gives birth to her third son.

This book wants to be Game of Thrones sooooooo badly. It has multiple protagonists in different countries, follows a bunch of characters vying for power, and has so much unnecessary sex. From the first chapter, there’s a scene where the two Polish kids are watching their parents have sex, and I could not tell you what the purpose of that scene was in the greater sense of the story. This continues as the kids grow up and become parents, there’s a lot of information about their sex lives that I could have done without.

There also is a total lack of regard for the servants. The two Polish children have a matching set of servants that follow them around. The daughter’s is mute as well. There’s no interest whatsoever in the servant’s life or opinions. I think there’s a description of her communicating wordlessly maybe once. It is assumed that she cares for the princess who becomes the queen, but since this book is claiming to be a feminist retelling of history focusing on the often overlooked queen, it seems incomplete to me without going into detail on the servants who are the backbone of the household.

I respect the author for trying to fill in the gaps and return some history to the queen that has been overlooked by the history books. But it is hard for me to have any interest when I do not care about the characters, either because I do not know them well enough or they just keep having sex. So as a whole, this book fails to follow through on its goal.

There is a sequel, and potentially a whole series. I however, will not be reading it as I do not wish to spend any more time on this story.

This Is Beautiful: Rite of Spring

 I saw a dance performance of Stravinski's "Rite of Spring" last weekend and it was incredible! It was performed with an all-African cast and it was such a powerhouse of talent. The dancers were all on dirt that was spread across the stage, and I thought this was brilliant because it so fundamentally changed their relationship to the ground now that they could feel it, bury their feet in it, and fling it around. You could also then see their footprints and track the dancers to an extent. The costumes were incredible as well, I loved the choice to put all of the women in light dresses that you could see the dirt and sweat stains on, while the men were in dark pants. And of course the soloist at the end was incredible, such a talented actor and dancer. Definitely not a performance to miss!

“Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture” by Sherronda J. Brown

Just finished this book in time for Ace Week! I have been looking forward to this since I found out early this year that Brown got a book deal and was releasing this. It’s a really amazing book, I’ve been tweeting about it as I go through and it’s been a great experience.

The book is written in a really accessible way, while still getting into deeper ideas and themes. All of the chapters are relatively short, and they open with a quick anecdote or illustration of the topic. This would actually make it work quite well as a series of essays, where you can separate out the chapters.

As you can tell from the title, it focuses a lot on race, and how particularly Black individuals are hypersexualized and fetishized. Many people doubt that Black aces exist because of this, and the book is a really strong reclamation of this identity. Brown in particular focuses on the experiences of Black women, and I think reading this text will be so powerful for that demographic.

My favorite chapter was probably the one on asexuality with historical characters. In it Brown goes into two historically queer, Black figures and creates the argument that they could be read as asexual. However, she doesn't go so far as to force the label on them and put them into this box. Instead she simply creates the space for them to be read as such and that space in and of itself is undeniably queer and ace. Which I agree wholeheartedly with, it was great to see this spelled out while nodding my head vigorously.

This is an excellent read regardless of your orientation, race, or gender. It's so important to understand others' experiences and how these ideas have shaped the way you see others. I hope that there's more books like this on the way, this is hopefully only the beginning of this exploration.

This Is Beautiful: Wynton Marsalis' "All Rise"

 This past weekend I got to see a performance of Wynton Marsalis' symphony "All Rise" at my university, featuring the composer himself on trumpet. It was incredible! There wasn't a single dull moment and you could really hear all of his influences from jazz to blues to classical to everything in between! And seeing the master himself on trumpet was really amazing, I could instantly tell who he was just based on how he used that horn.

Don't skimp on classical music, it has some amazing gems in it and it's just as diverse as any other genre.

“The Blood of Olympus” by Rick Riordan

This book is the final installment of the Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan. I knew that I read this when it first came out, but I didn’t really have any memory of it. I realized why after I finished this book, it’s… not a great ending to the series.

There’s a lot of good things, don’t get me wrong, but overall it just doesn’t leave much of an impression. The final battle is kind of separated in two, there’s one battle with everyone’s godly parents that is pretty cool, but then there’s the battle with the Greek and Roman demigods fighting Gaea, the big bad of the series. This final final fight just feels anti-climatic. All that really happens is they rip Gaea out of the earth and from there defeating her is pretty simple. It’s mentioned that there are casualties, sure, but none of them are named characters so it doesn’t really impact the reader. It feels like things are getting wrapped up nice and neat because that’s what you do at the end rather than giving a satisfying ending to the series and the journey that we’ve been on.

One exception though that I want to comment on is Nico’s journey. I didn’t think much about this the first time I read the book, like I said I didn’t remember much. I think I forgot that Nico is revealed to be gay in an earlier book. But throughout this book, the relationship between Nico and Will (a child of Apollo) is really clearly a romantic relationship. Well not yet. But likely soon. I did not notice this at all the first time and it was really lovely to go back and realize that this is actually a great way to show a queer character in a way that doesn’t focus on the queerness as the only aspect of their personality. And it shows so nicely that Nico is opening up more to the people around him and forming friendships.

This is as far as I got the first time that I read Riordan’s books. I’m going to next pick up The Trials of Apollo series, and this will be the first time that I’m reading these so it’ll be very exciting to see what I’ve been missing!

This Is Beautiful: Sophisticated Ladies

 Last weekend I went to see "Sophisticated Ladies" which was a musical revue of Duke Ellington's music. It was a ton of fun! The dancing, music, and production in general was spectacular. I mean it's hard to mess it up with such great music but still good to see.

Only comment was that there was a part at the beginning where different cast voices came up talking about the legacy of Duke Ellington, and it went on just a little too long... Like I get that it's important but the thing was full of "um's" and just took up so much time. But there were other cool allusions to the history of the production, including closing the first act with footage of individuals from the original run! Which was very cool.

Anyways my favorite part were all of the dancers. There was a cast member whose only role was to tap dance (no singing) and he was absolutely amazing! He paid a great tribute to Gregory Hines through his performance. And there was another cast member who incorporated hip-hop stunningly well to his performance, a great way to show how these art forms change over time.

It was fun, it was fabulous, it was a great time!

“An Unnatural Life” by Erin K. Wagner

This is the third and final novella from Tor.com’s sci-fi drop that I read. Honestly this is the one that I had the most issues with. The story is about a lawyer living on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, and she ends up defending a robotnic, or a robot worker, in court for murder. Everyone sees the robots as inferior and she ends up ostracized and laughed at for trying. Her argument for an appeal on his case is that he didn’t have a jury of his peers, everyone was biased against him. It’s alluded that this argument implies that robots aren’t the same as humans, that he needed to be tried by a jury of AI, and this could throw some robot rights into question. After winning the appeal though, the robot is murdered in prison.

My main sticking point is that there’s a fairly obvious parallel to racism here. Many Black individuals were unfairly convicted because of prejudiced juries, yet they are seen as equals in the eyes of the law now. Why not use that as a precedent to protect against robot rights being stripped? Especially with the prison fights and a near riot in front of the lawyer’s house, the similarities are obvious. So I’m not sure why that didn’t come up, unless the author truly didn’t think of it. Which feels incredibly disappointing. When it comes to things like AI and new life forms, we do in fact have a history of treating even fellow human beings like monsters. It’s not that hard to find it.

Anyways so this was the only novella in the collection that I didn’t love, and two out of three isn’t bad. We shall see what the next one has in store for me!

This Is Beautiful: Event Planning

 This is an odd one but also I am in a rough patch right now and I am having a crisis over what I want to do with my life. But event planning is pretty fun? I mean I have planned events in the past and I think they are an awesome way to do community building and information sharing. But I'm at the stage right now where a bunch of events that have been in the works for a while are all coming together and it is really nice to see that happen. I don't know, that's all I have going for me this week, life's been hard.

“Unlocked” by John Scalzi

This is the second novella in the Tor.com trilogy of sci-fi stories. This one hit a little close to home. The conceit is that this is a collection of interviews about Haden’s Syndrome, a fictional pandemic that wipes out a decent chunk of the world’s population and leaves more “locked in,” a state where their brains are fully functioning but their bodies are completely immobile. It details the onset, progression, and how treatments were developed, as well as the future of the disease. Many experts and patients weigh in.

First thing’s first, this was definitely inspired by COVID-19 in the United States, you cannot convince me otherwise. Haden’s starts with an initial outbreak from an epidemiology conference and the symptoms are different, but otherwise it is so so similar. The initial failure of public health policy to contain it really feels awful having been through it in real life. What’s different through are the treatments that get developed. Haden’s never gets an effective vaccine, but the treatment ends up being that you can hook up a locked in person’s neurons to a lifelike robot suit that they can then move around. This leads to a great solution for the disease, but I really like how the author lays out the additional problems it creates. Now those using the robots get discriminated against, and you can’t use the robots for anything other than Hayden’s which gets into disability rights.

I couldn’t believe how short this story was, less than 80 pages and it hit a lot of different issues. There’s prison reform where inmates are initially used as test subjects for the neurons. There’s virtual social lives versus physical social lives with those locked in finding more supportive communities amongst themselves. There’s intense politics around the funding for research. It’s all so well crafted and well done.

The different voices did all sound pretty similar, no one had a distinctive turn of phrase or anything like that, but that added to the smoothness of the narrative so I don’t think it’s necessary. Overall it was a thought-provoking read and would highly recommend.