👹 Rakesfall. I felt on fairly firm ground in Ch 16 (even though its a play in the novel that ignores the 4th wall entirely), but Ch 17 has me spun around.

This makes me laugh every time I see it.

👹 Rakesfall Ch 14-15. Answers, but the kind that I feel like I barely have my fingernails in.

👹 Rakesfall, chapters 10-13. Odeg and Mrs. Akan win their case, Vidyucchika has awesome/awful grandmothers, more dead children, the red wheel.

👹 Almost caught up. Rakesfall, chapters 7-9, painted in vivid red. We see a few more lives and deaths. There are ghosts, curses that can't be escaped but may be dislodged, and skins that can be shed (and then carried).

counterpoint: the dead should make it harder for me to speak ill of them

Along with The Runaway Bunny, LoTR is literally the first story I remember, thanks to my parents reading it aloud to my older sister while I listened.

I live in Tucson. If I reply with anything other than Sonoran dog toppings (wrap dog in bacon. Top with pinto beans, grilled onions, pico de gallo, mayo, mustard, and jalapeno salsa) I'm pretty sure I'd have to move (also, they're delicious, so I wouldn't anyway).

👹 Chapters 3-6: I'm still mostly picking at little details I manage to grasp out of the stream of beautiful poetic language. I am also remembering some later chapters and feeling sure I'll have to flip back to these when I get to them.

👹 Chapter 2, The Discourse. Still mostly just letting the weirdness ride. Annelid meets a demon, and Leveret grows a pathetic beard.

👹 🧵 I did my reading like a good kid yesterday, but life got in the way of posting. So this is a placeholder more than anything else. One chapter into a reread of Rakesfall I'm already looking forward to noticing more this time around.

I married a Texan and spend several weeks there every year, and this has me howling. Also, smoked brisket is divine.

🐾 The end! While I can't say I'm going to go read the rest of Murakami's oeuvre, I'm so glad I read this book in this way. I enjoyed thinking about the translations, the themes, the memes, and the incessant weirdness.

We took Title IX away from little girls today and nearly took birthright citizenship too, and our leaders are calling it a victory. I wish the US Senate could show up with even 1/100 the energy of the average public school mom in Minnesota.

congratulations, transphobes: the biggest perverts you know will be doing genital inspections on your children

Exactly this. As someone who was a kid (in conservative SC/GA even) during peak Satanic Panic, I find it so, so disheartening that so many of my age cohort who rolled our eyes at the ridiculous pearl-clutching of our elders then can't recognize the exact. same. bullshit. now.

The trans panic and vaccine refusal are, like the Satanic Panic before them, niche beliefs seeded by fringe lunatics and built whole cloth by the media Just Asking Questions. Normal people have to be taught to think this way. They can be taught to forget.

🐾 Book 3, Ch 35-36. Toru's imagination gets him into trouble, but his trusty bat gets him out of it. He manages action, and leaves himself so drained that he's at risk of drowning.

🐾 Book 3 Ch 31-33: we're now in a tense thriller. Either Toru has an imposter, a doppelganger, or did something in a fugue state. Each of the three is equally plausible based on the events of the book so far. (Oh, also plausible that the attack on NW is all in his head).

👹 Testing, testing. Getting used to the new feed emoji. I'm looking forward to rereading Rakesfall next month - I plowed through it much, much too quickly at the end of December, and am excited to slow down and pay more attention this time.

There now go read You have my blessing as Pope Of Books (that is me, I am the Pope, I usually do not tell people because I don't want all the groveling and obsequiousness, you know how it is)

I've finished the materials for all of the Astounding Awards nominees. Hats off to all the finalists! Oh, god, so many more categories to go 😅 Next up: Best Novelette, primarily because I've already read four of the six.

🐾 Book 3, ch 28-30. These last few days of reading have felt really disjointed, but at least Toru's back to sleeping in the middle of the day and NOT being in a well. Malta seems put out by the cat coming back.

🐾 Book 3, Ch 25-27. Murakami's no slouch. Absolutely breathtaking chapter 26 bookended by a couple where nothing much happens.

🐾 Low hanging fruit, my meme game is weak, but I wanted to participate

🐾 Book 3, Ch 21-24. Time is a circle. Toru talks to Kumiko ("Kumiko"). The "fittings" business goes on hiatus.

I'm reading a selection of horror poems during a night of "Gay Dread" on Friday, June 26, 2026 with other local horror authors and drag queens at Checkered Flag Tavern II.

Honey is great, but have we really tasted every kind of slime that bugs make? We could be missing out on something.

No lies found here in Tucson, where we all leave our desks to go watch the monsoon rains (that could return any day now and I would not mind one bit 👀).

"Every hometown's got the ominous megastructure, what's yours?" I'll nominate Augusta, GA's Trestle. Kid from my high school (several years before I attended) died jumping from it. Access was not nearly as blocked off as it probably should be, at least not in the late 90s.

🐾 And I'm caught up. Book 3, Ch 17-20. More of Nutmeg/Cinnamon (and surprise, it's weird and awful!), more May, more Ushikawa, bad cybersecurity. So. Much. Trauma.

🐾 Book 3 Ch 7-16 in one frantic catch-up read. The structure of this book has gotten wild, Toru looks for Kumiko from the bottom of his very own well, more very normal stories from new characters, and NW continues to be the worst.

Very rarely post Amazon deals, but this one for the hardcover of COFFIN MOON is significant, and the hc is gonna start getting phased out as the paperback pub date approaches. Grab it up! www.amazon.com/Coffin-Moon-...

I loved this book! It deserved those awards and nominations!

🐾 The cat! May writing deeply weird May letters! Toru takes action by following complete strangers' strange instructions. This book continues to bewilder.

🐾 Book 3, ch 1-3 Slow chapters after the end of Book 2. Toru hibernates, then goes back to people-watching. We hear the wind-up bird in what seems like a flashback.

I liked But Not Too Bold, and I loved Cabaret in Flames. I'm very excited for this one!

I'm very excited to finally be able to share the news. TYRANT IN THE CRACKS is set in an unnamed country inspired by the Southern Cone, a part of Latin America that is rarely featured in speculative fiction: its fauna, flora, food, and—of course—its political history 🌿

Come join our July readalong of Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall! We'll read a bit every day and post our thoughts (and memes) in the feed. Reply to the quoted skeet if you'd like to be added. 🪐📚💙

It’s now official: Avi Loeb is the RFK Jr. of astrophysics. 🧪

Oh, that was THIS major pain in the ass! Lots of reshuffling and rearranging from the missions that rely on the DSN, lost data, extra stress.

Broccoli. Along with turnips (but no one likes those, right?), I won't eat it even to be polite.

🐾 We finish Creta Kano's story. It's rough going. Malta sucks.

🐾🧵 Book 2, Ch 7-8 Kumiko has trouble reliably detecting reality, Toru remembers some visceral beat poetry, Noboru Wataya insults him in his dreams, and the mystery woman fails to focus on what's important here.

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🐾 Book 2, Ch 5-6. Well. That was...something. May Kasahara is the voice of reason, Toru has to go sit in a well, and what started out as an actually sweet description of Toru and Kumiko's meeting went badly astray. Also Jellyfish Trauma. 🧵

It's not very often that a writer come across such a perfect set up to post one of her bits, and why would I even resist www.orions-belt.net/archives/pro...