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I always enjoy Nghi Vo's Singing Hills Cycle stories. There's something about the idea of monks going around and collecting knowledge and stories that manages to always be compelling.

A Mouthful of Dust is a short novella centered on food, survival, and secrets that don't want to be revealed. It did not dislodge Mammoths at the Gates as my favorite Singing Hills book, but it was still an enjoyable snack.

Thanks as always go to my agent, Diana Fox, who told me back in 2020 that maybe the world wasn’t ready for famine and eating babies. Then in 2024, she said, “Okay, they may be ready now,” and here we are.

Along with having a recipe for curry, I was amused at some of the author's notes at the end of the book.

Classic Scalzi popcorn, spiced with snark.

It's a solid book, don't get me wrong. Good foreshadowing and callbacks. Good worldbuilding for the series and setup for future books. The plot was grippy in the moment.

My biggest disappointment is that protagonist's defining characteristic is that she's naught more than a hypercompetent ball of snark; it makes her uninteresting, and it felt like we were told more about her emotions from her father than we got shown ourselves.

This was one of the books up for the #SFFBookClub poll that didn't win. The airquotes downside of putting the polls together is that everything on there is something I want to read, so I end up reading them all anyway.

This book was pitched as "a generation ship novel in verse" and it delivered. It felt like such a fresh way to talk about old concepts, and its flowery imagery felt less out of place than it would have in prose. It could have stood to be more weird, but each point of view had striking and effectively different styles, especially in terms of format, but also in imagery and tone and pacing. Overall, the plot didn't strike me as being particularly novel, but it was enjoyable and that wasn't really why I was coming to this book in the first place.

Hey you! (Yes, you!) If you're seeing this, then you probably have an adjacent taste in books, so this could likely be of interest to you.

We're reading The King Must Die during this February for #SFFBookClub.

SFFBookClub is an asynchronous fediverse book club. There's no meeting or commitment. If this book looks interesting to you, then you can join in by reading it during February and posting on the hash tag #SFFBookClub with any feelings or thoughts or reviews or quotes.

More details: sffbookclub.eatgod.org/

When I heard of this book--a generation ship novel entirely in verse--I was excited and felt some trepidation, because it can be easy for a technical feat like that to overshadow the story. Once I had it in hand and flicked through, I felt both of those things more intensely, because parts of the book employ the sort of creative layouts I associate more with zines than novels.

It turns out that all of that drives the story and characterisation with a singular focus. Even the wackiest-looking page layouts are a guide for pacing and mood, and work fantastically well. I am unusually tempted to just go back to the beginning and read the whole thing through again.

It is also an interesting story, and the three main characters are compelling. It made sense to mostly focus on them at the expense of the ship's crew, but at the end I was left a little frustrated that one question was never addressed: what would have motivated rank-and-file members of the first generation crew to sign up?

It is also a deeply Christian story, enough so that I feel like that needs to be a potential CW. But this is handled in a very interesting way that worked for me as a non-Christian reader.

#SFFBookClub

This is one of those 5/5 ratings where I don't think the book is perfect, but it gets it because it is so intensely targeted at my own interests and I'm so grateful to have read it. Some bullet points to entice you:

• anti-capitalism, anti-cop
• train heists
• found family vibes
• first person point of view with an internalized narration to a second person "you"
• fantasy religions that don't feel like direct analogies of real ones
• revenge plot and revolutionaries
• gaaaaaaay

The book is so unapologetically queer and kinky, it's great. The author credits Stone Butch Blues (among many other things) in the end notes, which feels entirely unsurprising. The gender-y and queer bits also both intersect with the in-world religions in realistic ways.

It's a book that desperately needs a map; there's a pile of countries, religions, and politics especially when it hits the Chauncey estate section. The book does a good job of keeping it all ~~straight~~ queerly differentiated but the world has so much texture--it's a ttrpg campaign setting crying out for illustration! It also feels like a living world; characters having a life both off-page and outside of the protagonist make it feel even more real.

The book opens with a labor dispute and police violence and sworn revenge, but from there it doesn't shy away from critiques of power and incrementalism and reformers. There's some wild rich people monologues where they unintentionally bare themselves as soulless vampires. There's a bandit charade of a hidden equitable country, pretending to be part of a baronial system.

Sunlight licked between bruisy limestone smokestacks and telegraphy spires, and the crumbling knuckled colonnades of an empire that's long gone.

I found the writing to be a delight: the narrator is at times unreliable, and the writing is full of dreamy metaphors. At times, somebody will bust out with a multi-page exposition about religion, or a set of introductions to a full dramatis personae worth of baronets. The final lap of the book has its own tonal shift that I won't get into for reasons. Somehow this all held together for me; maybe it's that none of these parts overstayed their welcome. I'm sure some folks will bounce off of this writing style, but I'm not folks, that's for sure.

Being a Hereafterist is a commitment to creating a brand-new world all the time. It is the method of making a new world, it does not stop, we are never there yet. We have never arrived at a restful Hereafter, we must keep making. We will become a liberated collective, a plague will roll over us, and a famine, and fifty thousand bullets, and we will need to make choices. We will need to change. We must resist the ossification of precedent. We march toward Hereafter, not tomorrow, we march past tomorrow, we know tomorrow will be hard.

In the end, this is a fuck yeah revenge story about disaster queers fighting capitalism with violence. It's less about answers or even hope, and more about conveying a sense of angry determinism working for a future none of them will see.

@eldang@outside.ofa.dog I also put this on my personal to-read list after it fell off the sffbookclub poll. This is all exciting to hear; if you're reading it right now, maybe I'll give it a go next too so I can read in parallel.