Sub Rosa

 Just finished: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This one was really fun. I have three more Hugo nominees to read but so far this is on top. There's something weirdly quaint about it—it's a girl and her robot story, or rather, a robot and his girl story, these two absolute oddballs wandering a post-human wasteland on a quest for meaning, and I can read like a thousand stories with this concept and not get bored if the author pulls it off. Which I think Tchaikovsky does. IMO his stuff either floats your boat or it doesn't but I find him incredibly fun and humanist and this was a delight.

UpRising by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back (ed.). This is an ARC and I don't know when it's coming out, but when it does, you should read it. It's an anthology, mostly poetry, about mad pride/mad liberation and most of the writing is stunning. It's dark stuff—besides the mental illness, there's addiction, homelessness, police brutality, and so on—but written with unbridled passion and compassion. Interestingly enough, there's a story by A.G.A. Wilmot in it (the author of Withered, which I went on a big rant about last week). As with that book, the protagonist is asexual and has an eating disorder but there's nothing cozy about the story and it was actually one of the highlights for me.

How To Write a Fantasy Battle by Suzannah Rowntree. Another ARC, this is a short little book that is exactly what it says on the package. For reasons, this is pretty relevant to my interests right now, though it focuses more on medieval-style warfare than, say, urban guerrilla fighting but with wizards. That said, it is an accessible walk through the big concepts that apply to a number of different settings, using examples from the Crusades to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Super useful, well-written, and even entertaining.

Currently reading: A Sorceress Comes To Call by T. Kingfisher. I just started this one. It's about a girl named Cordelia who grows up with a, shall we say overbearing?? mother. Who is able to make her "obedient"—basically paralyzed, mute, and silent at will. She's not allowed to close her door, and her only joy in life is riding her horse, which her mother approves of because it'll help her get a suitor. She befriends a girl in town who also likes riding. That's about as far as I've gotten. Very creepy so far, though, I'm intrigued.