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@tofuwabohu@wyrms.de oh gosh I didn't know there was a third book here, that's exciting!

I will change, as everyone changes throughout life. We change when we learn new things, when we meet new people, when we move to a new place.

What We Are Seeking is an incredible book.

Let me pitch this to you by comparing it to other touchpoints. It's got a similar anthropological and gender focus to Left Hand of Darkness. There's alien biology, transforming yourself to meet it, and (some) humility about colonialism that feels reminiscent of To Be Taught if Fortunate. The protagonist comes from a planet without marriage nor social homophobia and gets into an Ethan of Athos-y situation when he is forced onto a planet where most people are married and have strict het gender roles.

It's also a story about being the only person carrying your own culture with you in a community. It's got first contact and linguistics. It's about queer solidarity in the face of oppression. It's about the meaning of vows. It's about religious trauma. It's a story about third genders and the cost of "driving a wedge into other people's heads to pry open a space to live". There's just so much going on. This is not even getting into the worldbuilding that spills over outside the immediate plot about other planets and earth and the ship culture and the aiyi and and and

It's a slow, meandering, interpersonal sort of book. It's prone to cultural monologues. Structurally, it's a story that weaves a number of self-reinforcing parallel threads that all come to a similar point. Thematically, this book centers on the idea of change, and each of these story threads ends with taking a step into a new and destabilizing future together. We see the friction and the feelings and the decision point, but the reader isn't handed any certainty about the future. It's a form that lands with deep emotional resonance (especially that exquisitely worded final sentence), but it's also one that doesn't end with the typical level of plot closure you might be expecting.

It's not perfect, it's sometimes clunky, and it's not for everybody, but this is a book that is just going to rattle around in my brain for a long while.

Luminous: 100/100

Luminous is a book about death, loss, and self-loathing, told via the universal medium of robots.

I love the way the connections between the lives of the different characters are gradually revealed as the story unfolds. I also really appreciate the complexity and depth of the characters, even when they seen stereotypical seen from one angle.

The author wrote in the acknowledgements that she started out to write a children's book and kind of got derailed by personal circumstances into this thing that is much darker and more complex, but I'm very glad she did, Luminous is extremely good.

#SFFBookClub

I could feel this book having an impact on me over the weeks as I slowly read it a chapter at a time. I started responding to my own desires and patterns differently: if I found myself scrolling Tiktok for a long time, I didn't just think "I shouldn't be doing this", but asked myself if I truly had anything else I needed to be doing, if the activity was hurting me at this moment, and if I might benefit from some time to let my mind rest and listen to other people's stories for a while. Conversely, in moments when the chronic fatigue eases and I have a bit of mental energy, I often immediately start thinking up interesting or productive things I could be doing - this book helped me to recognise the ways that this habit is harming me, and question whether any of these activities are contributing to the restful and restorative self-care that I really need right now. It's actually a similar impact to reading Pema Chodron, and that's no accident: Laziness Does Not Exist is primarily about practising compassion for others and for oneself, and changing deeply ingrained thought patterns that cause harm.

There were moments when I wanted a more rigorous critical engagement with the subject matter. For example, the brief passages that engage in media criticism don't seem to reflect an understanding of narrative technique (Steven Universe is not about individual heroism!). When crossing the disciplinary boundary from Price's field of social psychology into mental health or clinical psychiatry, I think complexities show up that aren't accounted for. A key example is the subject of motivation: Price assures us that what looks superficially like a lack of motivation is often a struggle with depression, and although this is true, it's also true that amotivation, avolition, or apathy can be a primary symptom in some health conditions that cannot be cured, not a secondary effect that will be eliminated once the core issue is resolved. It can be misleading or even invalidating if your version of compassion is to say to someone "you're not really demotivated, you're just depressed" - it's like saying "you're not really sick, you're just anxious".

This matters, because like any other disability justice issue, it comes down to agency and autonomy - if a health condition curtails your will before it even arises, how can you enact free will? In such a scenario, the outward appearance of laziness is neither a personal failing to be handled through discipline, nor a response to unjust circumstances to be treated with compassion, but a theft of one's personal agency that should elicit righteous rage. I do think the answer to this is contained in the pages of the book: we need to shift our view of agency to a more collective mode, because none of us can truly do this alone.

On the whole, Laziness Does Not Exist is a corrective that aims to guide us away from the ethos that leads to burnout and abusive workplaces. I'm left with the somewhat haunting question: if I was able to separate my personal motivations from the systems that abuse us, would I be able to recognise when I've done "enough"?

I am sometimes a grumpus about fairy tale retellings, because it's been done so many times in so many ways that it's hard to find anything fresh.

This book is Cinderella by way of: what if Cinderella dies in the first paragraph, becomes a ghost that is also a haunted house, and goes to the ball mostly to eat food. Honestly, delightful.

The final scenes come a little too quickly for my tastes, but there's only so much space in a novella. (Something something, I guess that's what fanfic is for.)

I quite enjoyed this book.

Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?

Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?

Gliff is a surveillance dystopia novel—thematically about words, borders, and questions about authentic reality.

The point of view in this book is a child being raised on the margins of a system; they're an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite understand everything enough about the world to lay it out explicitly for the reader.

Stylistically, the writing is a stream of consciousness in the narrator's head, relating the past. Sometimes not having quotation marks for speech can feel jarring for me as a reader, but somehow here it lent itself to a feeling in the narrator's head, of a story being told stream of consciousness style. Because this book focuses on words, there's also some fun wordplay.

Despite being a dystopian story, all of this gives it a dreamy quality that I quite enjoyed.

New Murderbot! An action snack, but a bit shallow. It was fine—I will read every Murderbot until the end of time—but also, there just isn't enough here for me.

I said, “We’re not sacrificing anybody.” It just came out, I couldn’t help it.

(Emotion check: Apparently there is an easier way to do things, but I wouldn’t know. I like to do it the hard way, and take as much physical and emotional damage as possible.)

The new shtick this book is that Murderbot has installed a mental health module that checks in with it when its neural tissue generates "weird chemicals or whatever". Murderbot has to explicitly deal more with its feelings that normally it would ignore. Unfortunately, this narrative device doesn't feel like it has the same level of impact on the story as something like the trauma response in System Collapse.

I wish we had gotten more character development or even just character reveals. We get more Farai, but there's not enough ART or Three for my tastes.