"The Queen of Attolia" by Megan Whalen Turner

 My partner started reading this book series to me, we started with The Thief and recently finished The Queen of Attolia (with a pretty big gap, we forgot about it a little in the middle there). It was a pretty interesting continuation of the world set up in the first book, as well as the journey that our protagonist is on.

The book starts with Eugenides, who we know as the Thief of Eddis from the first book, getting captured in Attolia. He meets the Queen again, and she keeps him in captivity. To send a message back to the Queen of Eddis, Attolia has his hand cut off. Jen returns to Eddis depressed and having a hard time recovering. After a while, he starts to return to his old self, and he suggests going to kidnap the Queen of Attolia to resolve the war that has sprung up between their countries. 

Meanwhile, the Queen of Attolia is hosting the Mede, an advisor from a larger country. She knows that he is after her hand in marriage, but she's stringing him along for now. She's familiar with backstabbing advisors and court drama. Jen successfully gets the Queen of Attolia to come with him, and he proposes his plan then. He'll let her live, if she'll marry him and end the war. Attolia is skeptical but angrily agrees. Jen tells her that he loves her and has for years. That's really why he did all this. 

They are stopped by the Mede's forces and head back to Attolia. The Queen there sets a trap for the Mede and ousts him for good with the help of Eddis. The book ends with her agreeing to marry Jen and them saying that they both love each other.

The decision to maim your protagonist in the second book is a pretty bold choice, but I kind of like it. Jen can't just have successes as a thief, and now he has to adapt in pretty significant ways. He can still steal things, sure, but he ends up becoming a king instead as well. It forces the story to change with him.

The love story felt a little forced for sure, I'm not totally convinced that Jen has loved the Queen of Attolia his whole life. But he never mentions it in the narration until his confession so there's some plausibility there. It is weird but there is a lot of effort put into the ending to make their decision to get married also seem realistic and not a convenient change of heart. Attolia barely talks to Jen for a while and insists that he's lying until the Queen of Eddis talks to her. And then she finally talks to Jen about it and how she cut off his hand and all that. Then it finally gets resolved.

There appears to be some larger arcs with the Mede going on, and that'll be interesting to see how they develop. But the next book is my partner's favorite, so I'm excited to finally get to that!

This Is Beautiful: Vacation

 I'm heading out on a 2 week vacation on Saturday, and I am very much looking forward to it. It will be a working vacation as I make sure all of my i's are dotted and t's crossed on this paper, but that's ok. Gives me an excuse for a little alone time. And it will be so nice to just take a break from the grind. The summer has been restorative, but there's always less that I could be doing.

"Dragonflight" by Anne McCaffrey

 I honestly don't remember how I found out about this book, but I am not surprised that a book about dragons got caught in my radar. This is an award-winning book from a female author written in 1979, so I expected to both be excited and probably have some disappointments along the way. Unfortunately though, I think the disappointments outweighed the excitements here.

The book swaps between the narration of Lessa, a young girl seeking revenge for her family's murder, and F'lar a dragonrider. Lessa has been hiding out as a dirty servant girl in the castle where her family used to live, until they were murdered by the ambitious Fax. F'lar is a dragonrider on a Search, where they are trying to find new dragonriders. He is brought to the castle with Fax where he senses Lessa's power as she goads him into fighting and killing Fax. From there, F'lar brings Lessa to the Weyr when the dragon hatching starts. Lessa bonds with Ramoth, the queen dragon and starts to be educated in the ways of the dragonriders.

The previous Weyrleaders and dragon queen were both lazy and neglected the traditions. The country that they're in gets passed by a Red Star (implied to be Jupiter, of which they are on a moon) that sends out Threads from the sky that burrow into the ground and feed off of life. There have been no Threads in a few hundred years, so people doubt the importance of dragons and their keeping. A lot of knowledge has been lost as a result, but F'lar and Lessa believe. Anyways, a change in regime comes with Ramoth mating with F'lar's dragon, making F'lar Weyrleader. Also now the humans are a couple as well. F'lar starts trying to uncover the lost secrets of the past. Lessa desperately wants to fly and go between which is this way dragons can pass through space to get somewhere quicker. Lessa in her untrained habits then discovers that they can go through time as well, and dragons can time travel!

The Threads come sooner rather than later, and they are very unprepared. To help, F'lar sends some dragons back in time ten years to mature them faster. This is hard on those people, humans don't like being in two places at once, and Lessa discovers that the reason most of the dragons disappeared 500 years ago is because they came forward in time to their aid. She decides to go back to 500 years ago and manages to bring them forward with their knowledge, technology, and the like. The group is much more prepared to face the Threads now and can fight together!

Alright so I have a whole lot of issues here. First they're doing the whole "not like other girls" thing with Lessa as during the hatching she keeps making fun of the other girls who are terrified of the dragon (the dragonling does kill 2 of them). Not to mention that the gender of it all is handled pretty poorly in my opinion, it's never explained but it's evident that boy dragons mate with boys and girl queen dragons with girls. F'lar and the others keep making a fuss about how the girl has to be "pretty" which isn't explained until the mating. Guess they all want her to be pretty because as soon as the dragons start having sex the humans do too. Not to mention that there's a paragraph in the book about how if the dragons aren't involved F'lar is basically raping Lessa which seems entirely unnecessary. 

Then there's the time travel. Seems a little ridiculous to me that Lessa would be the first person to figure out that dragons can do that at all, but even if I excuse that there's all of these plot holes that time travel introduces. The biggest being that if the dragons all disappearing contributed to the decline in their culture and traditions, wouldn't leaving them in their own time mean that the traditions would have a better chance at carrying forward? And then they wouldn't need to get the dragons from the past. Or at the very least, send them back to their own time once the Thread fighting was done. They can't all have been happy abandoning the rest of their lives and living in the future. It's a very big sacrifice for not entirely necessary gain.

There is a while series here, but I am feeling very done after this book. I respect what it's doing and that it's award winning and all that, but it is pretty clearly not for me. I don't think I could do another installment of this, I just haven't really connected with the characters and don't think I could cheer them on through more of this.

This Is Beautiful: Getting Close

 I am nervous about posting this as I might be proven wrong, but I do feel like I am getting close to the end of the process with this paper. Things I think are coming together pretty nicely, and I feel as though most of what I'm doing is wrapping up things and settling details. Again I might be proven wrong because my advisor consistently can't go through everything that I'm working on so I'm just making a judgement call in places, but I'm really hoping it's getting close. The passage of time is freaking me out a little, it's July already, and I want to just get this out of my hands.

"Late Fascism" by Alberto Toscano

 This is the last book that I grabbed from Verso recently in a book buying binge, and I was quite excited about it. Reading it was still super interesting, but the audience is clearly an academic one and the book gets very bogged down in academic lingo and such. To be clear, I don't think that's the fault of Toscano or anything like that, I just am not the intended audience and was hoping for the book to be something different. But it would be so cool if a version of this was written for a more general audience.

The book uses writings about fascism throughout history to look at our contemporary US society and make comparisons. It's really interesting as it pulls from a broad pool of work encompassing Germany and Italy (of course) as well as Black radical writings talking about how the US has always been fascist to people of color. I found it really interesting how he talks about fascism and time, while many people regard fascism to be an obsession with the past, he characterizes it more as an obsession with the future which is how they can make changes so quickly. A similar twist is done with fascism and freedom where fascists don't shut up about freedom and liberty but it's specifically freedom to exploit other people, which then leads directly into how fascism and capitalism are directly intertwined. Capitalists need the freedom to do a capitalism. The book ends with a chapter that was probably the most new to me but there's this eroticism of fascism where fascists are seen as super sexy and seductive, like a bad boy aesthetic, when they were all known to be, just, gross. I hadn't thought of that aspect too much previously.

Now I'm sure there was plenty in the book that went over my head, I was familiar with most of the writers that are cited but I don't know them in depth. But Even I found that slogging through it I was able to pick up on and think about a number of ideas. Fascism just seems like an ever-more slippery concept to me with people crying that the current regime is fascism or isn't fascist and things like that. For me personally, I side with the fact that this is fascism but I have heard a compelling argument that fascism was a specific movement situated in a specific time in Italy/Germany around WWII and I do find that an interesting idea. Toscano does complicate that by pulling in writings from other cultures on fascism which I think makes this work much more compelling. Because the US and imperial regimes have always had an element of fascism, especially for people of color, and that is highlighted in this work. In most discussions I usually see that overlooked.

The last chapter on eroticism really made me think though about how fascists did win the aesthetics war. There's such a clear set of imagery and look to fascism, it's all black and red and angular, it's not hard to find it a little appealing. And it wasn't even the right being the only people promoting it, the fact that most people just equate Hitler with evil because we make these simplistic comparisons in decades of art comes from all corners! It's just bizarre! Meanwhile leftists are demonized by Democrats and Republicans alike (just look at the NYC mayoral primary, people are being super racist there). There isn't a set of aesthetics to fall back on and promote, which means that it doesn't spread as far without a ton of effort.

I found this to be a provoking read, and I might come back to it later to see if I can gleam more from the content. But if you don't want to go through an academic text, feel free to skip this, just do some reading on the history of fascism. Eventually I hope these ideas will make their way into a more accessible format, but we will have to wait on that.

This Is Beautiful: Progress

 Things have been hard lately, I can tell that I'm making progress but it doesn't feel like it's enough. I'm trying to remember to take a step back, look at everything I've done, and be proud of that. But it is hard, the summer is passing rapidly and I feel so pressured to get things done more quickly with very little assistance. Need to keep focusing on the big picture, and even just the progress that I can make over the course of a few days when things are working. There are plenty of figure edits and writing progress being made without me having to fret about it not being finalized.

"Love Expanded: How Asexuals and Aromantics are Redefining Love, Life, and Family" by Wren Burke

 Here's yet another book on asexuality and aromanticism that I got my hands on! This was a lovely surprise as these tend to come out in October when Ace Week is. I found this on Twitter also, so I was able to get it right as it came out (important for reasons that will come later). Overall, I don't think I necessarily learned new things, but it struck me that this book is an excellent model of how to blend the ace 101 information along with what to do and what changes to make with this information. 

The book has ten chapters covering everything from what love means to a-spec individuals to gender to family structure and ending with legislation. The author covers plenty of material that I'm already familiar with such as Ace by Angela Chen or Refusing Compulsory Sexuality by Sherronda Brown but also pulls from anecdotes, a survey of 1,900 aces they designed for the book, and interviews with ace researchers. I was really pleased to see that aromanticism was an integral part of the book, with Single at Heart by Bella DePaulo getting its turn in the spotlight. And in general, the book is very inclusive and just feels very queer. It isn't breaking up identities to only focus on one but discusses elements of queerness and what that can look like in other cultures.

Helpfully, the book does not assume that you know much about asexuality and aromanticism, but it does not pander to folks that are new to the community. I find that if authors are writing more 101-type things that there are constant caveats about what they mean. This has its nuances, but I also felt that Burke just had a great handle on the material and was writing about what they were interested in. I also just feel that if you're picking up the book, you know what asexuality is and are likely asexual. But maybe I'm wrong (hoping that I'm a little wrong anyways). 

The ending though talks about what we need to do to make things better. And it starts with changing legislation and writing to MPs. Burke is British, I was honestly surprised how much US law was in the book, so I wasn't shocked by that. I do wonder though how quickly this book will go out of date as a result. Seriously, the most recent reference to the Ace Community Survey that I could find was 2019, it's been going on annually since then. How quickly will those legislative references go out of date? Or even more tragically, how many won't?

All in all, I thought this was a great addition to the canon of works on asexuality and aromanticism. I think it definitely has its niche as an intro text or something for someone who knows about asexuality but wants to start digging in deeper. I hope that it's a model for more works situating asexuality less as its own thing and more as fundamentally queer. And I dearly hope that there's more positive changes in legislation coming for us.