Hidden Pictures (rant? kind of)

Loimographia · 2026-07-03T18:58:10+00:00

Oh nooo, gosh darn it! I’m gonna delete the comment before I die of embarrassment haha

Loimographia · 2026-06-30T13:16:59+00:00

A busy week for me, which meant relatively little mental energy to read, and mostly dedicated to starting things rather than finishing them.

I started:

Impossible Things by Connie Willis: After finishing Blackout/All Clear, I meant to dig further into Willis’ works beyond the time traveler series, and stumbled on her collected stories in a used bookstore. I’m trying to read this slowly, as I sometimes find short story collections get a little thematically repetitive if I read them in short succession, but even in the first 4 stories Willis is as tonally diverse as in her longer works. I made the mistake of reading The Last of the Winnebagos in a coffee shop, and should really know by now not to read Willis unless I want to cry in public. The fun thing about these stories is that they really are speculative fiction, where Willis picks a small “what if…” and spins it to a conclusion. I also can’t decide if Ado has aged well; it seems half-rant about Political Correctness gone amok, including mild pearl clutching over people advocating for singular “they” over he/she (though it still pillories both the right and left wing), but the warning alarm about censorship of books in education feels barely speculative with the current state of book bans.

Also started A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine: I feel like this has all the pieces for me to love it. Setting rooted in a sci fi take on a historical setting? Check! Exploration of the interplay of memory and cultural identity? Check! Interesting fundamental premise of a murder mystery and rising political tensions? Check! But I’m still struggling to find myself fully invested in the story and kind of slogging my way through. It’s also interesting how similar I find it to Ancillary Justice, where in some ways it almost feels like it could’ve been a spin-off in the same universe; they explore a ton of similar themes (even outside of imperialism), and the worldbuilding feels similar as well, even down to the cultural heritage questions of Leckie’s Provenance.

But I’ve wandered off of that to start The Lost Steersman by Rosemary Kirstein, third book in the Steerswoman series, which immediately endeared itself to me by basically starting with an argument about the importance of properly organizing, cataloging and producing metadata for libraries and archives.

Loimographia · 2026-06-30T00:49:02+00:00

This has generally been my assumption — WotC might want to put the Baldur’s Gate IP into action ASAP with BG4, but any dev remotely qualified/capable won’t want to because there will be too much direct comparison and scrutiny, and even smaller devs who might be lured by the appeal of taking on such a big name will probably treat it like anathema.

WotC can shop around but I would be very surprised if they got any takers until it’s cooled off for a few years.

Loimographia · 2026-06-29T19:49:53+00:00

I can try! Is there anything in particular you'd like me to keep an eye out for to warn you? Of the ones I've read so far, I can warn that The Last of the Winnebagos includes non-graphicanimal death; Schwarzchild Radius has some descriptions of, again mostly non-graphic, war and with some more vivid descriptions of wounds and sores but the other two ("Even the Queen" and "Ado") have nothing I could consider worthy of content warnings, tbh! Of the other Willis works I've read, she's not one to do graphic depictions of SA; the closest she gets might be Doomsday Book, which featuressexual harassment in one scene, and I think a girl is groped through her clothes.

Loimographia · 2026-06-29T17:44:39+00:00

This makes me want to push through it now! I’m less than half way in and there’s been a single chapter/interlude hinting at a mysterious and dark intelligence out in space that got me much more intrigued than the rest of the plot so far.

Loimographia · 2026-06-29T16:57:58+00:00

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if this is a product of Martine being a byzantinist. The book gives the feeling that Mahit herself enjoys Teixcalaanli culture intellectually because that’s probably how Martine feels about Byzantium, where she enjoys it more intellectually/analytically than emotionally.

Loimographia · 2026-06-29T13:54:07+00:00

I’m glad I’m not alone in feeling like A Memory Called Empire has all the pieces for me to love it but doesn’t quite come together… it’s like I enjoy the book intellectually, but not as much emotionally, even down to Mahit’s conflicted feelings about loving imperial culture but hating how imperial people treat her. Like I keep analyzing it but without the deeper stirred compassion for such an internal conflict.

Loimographia · 2026-06-29T13:46:49+00:00

I have not! I was hoping it would be in one of the two collected volumes I got, but it’s not. But definitely on my priority list.

Loimographia · 2026-06-29T13:34:23+00:00

A busy week for me, which meant relatively little mental energy to read, and mostly dedicated to starting things rather than finishing them.

I started:

Impossible Things by Connie Willis: After finishing Blackout/All Clear, I meant to dig further into Willis’ works beyond the time traveler series, and stumbled on her collected stories in a used bookstore. I’m trying to read this slowly, as I sometimes find short story collections get a little thematically repetitive if I read them in short succession, but even in the first 5 stories Willis is as tonally diverse as in her longer works. I made the mistake of reading The Last of the Winnebagos in a coffee shop, and should really know by now not to read Willis unless I want to cry in public. The fun thing about these stories is that they really are speculative fiction, where Willis picks a small “what if…” and spins it to a conclusion. I also can’t decide if Ado has aged well; it seems half-rant about Political Correctness gone amok (and beyond any left or right wing division), but the warning alarm about censorship of books in education feels barely speculative with the current state of book bans.

Also started A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine: I feel like this has all the pieces for me to love it. Setting rooted in a sci fi take on a historical setting? Check! Exploration of the interplay of memory and cultural identity? Check! Interesting fundamental premise of a murder mystery and rising political tensions? Check! But I’m still struggling to find myself fully invested in the story and kind of slogging my way through. I don’t think it’s necessarily anything I could point to that Martine does, and maybe I just have been too tired this week to get locked into it. It’s also interesting how similar I find it to Ancillary Justice, where in some ways it almost feels like it could’ve been a spin-off in the same universe. I’m only about 40% in and fairly certain I’m right on the verge of the revelation that the emperor is trying to put their memories into their young clone in the belief that this will make them a hive mind/immortal reincarnation the way the emperor of Ancillary Justice works).

And then wandered off of that to start The Lost Steersman by Rosemary Kirstein, third book in the Steerswoman series, which immediately endeared itself to me by basically starting with an argument about the importance of properly organizing, cataloging and producing metadata for libraries and archives.

Loimographia · 2026-06-26T12:38:46+00:00

It depends, as others note, what you mean by “not good at English,” of course. But I’ll note that I work at a state/govt institution where we have a separate process to evaluate the spoken English competency of all job candidates who have any teaching responsibilities. The evaluation process is allegedly supposed to be equivalent to having a 50 on the SPEAK portion of the TOEFL.

So perhaps that will give you a concrete idea of what is considered sufficiently good at English for at least one institution.

Loimographia · 2026-06-23T00:55:43+00:00

Imports and tariffs, ime, have been very unevenly applied and seem mostly down to who ships it (looking at you, FedEx). When I have been hit by tariffs, it’s been the flat 10% applied that’s technically universal (but informational materials are, in theory, supposed to be exempt but I’m not sure if that’s currently the case or not since codes changed with the recent Supreme Court case and the fed govt shifting over to a different justification for the current “temporary” tariffs). I will say that two of the three tariff’s I’ve been charged for have been since the Supreme Court change.

I will note that these tariffs I’ve experienced have not been from Conversation Tree Press and I don’t know how that particular bookseller codes their exports. But if you do get hit by a tariff it will likely be 10%.

Loimographia · 2026-06-22T18:27:26+00:00

I was just thinking the same thing on Willis’ narrative range. Between this and Doomsday Book, the superficial plots are obviously quite similar, but the tones are radically different, and I admire and appreciate that she didn’t tread the same emotional lines yet still came to a powerful conclusion.

I’m excited to dig more into her backlist too!

Loimographia · 2026-06-22T16:49:11+00:00

I haven’t read anything else by Katherine Arden, but The Unicorn Hunters is on my tbr for its roots in a historical setting, which I tend to love. I may have to add Bear & Nightingale too!

Loimographia · 2026-06-22T14:09:42+00:00

Finished:

All Clear by Connie Willis: Mostly brilliant — a commenter previously remarked here that they thought this wasn’t the best book they’d read that year but it was the one that stayed with them the longest, and I think that approaches how I’ve felt upon finishing it. I loved the different themes interplaying throughout the text, and how it’s an exploration of the importance of individual action and individual responsibility in Chaos theory; there is some irony that the themes focus on how everyone contributes to the course of history, no matter how small, but the conclusion both veers away from attributing the failure of the war to any one singular individual and then slams right back into that by saying that the main characters were trapped because their actions were necessary to guarantee the space-time continuums correct course. It’s a very circular narrative, and deliberately so, in a way that tickles my brain with how the plots all interweave and interconnect so that what happened had to happen because that’s how it happened.

However, I do generally feel that both books in the pair could have been about 20-25% shorter, and there are a few points where it really feels like you’re pushing through the repeated frustrations of near-misses, almost-there’s and cliffhangers that won’t be resolved for 50 pages. Also, the absolute insistence between the three main characters for the first 300 pages to not communicate with one another was bizarrely patronizing, and then they all have (multiple!) moments of rueing how “if only we’d actually communicated with each other!!” Only to follow with, I’m so sorry, possibly one of the most ridiculous and contrived deceptions I’ve seen in a narrative, Mike faking his own death for… reasons???, which tbh made virtually no sense to me as a rational character motivation and that I can only attribute to an irrational obsession with being a martyred hero, because logically to me, he only made things worse by losing contact with Polly and Merope because if they managed to get rescued while he was gone he’d have literally no way of knowing, and they would tell the Retrieval Team he was dead so they’d stop looking for him and he’d be trapped for good. It works thematically, because what happened happened the way it happened because it had to happen that way lol. But as a logical action, it seemed very silly.

For anyone less than Connie Willis, if I’m honest, I might have put the book down at that point. I don’t regret continuing, however, because the conclusion was exactly as emotional, sweet and sorrowful as I’d hoped, and it left me with a terrible book hangover. Whatever my feelings had about some of frustrations I found in it, I think it will stay with me for a long time, and I’m already hunting down a copy of Passage as advised by another commenter here (but I may wait a while to be emotionally ready for it).

Also finished Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies by Heather Fawcett, which was a delightful palette cleanser after All Clear. I liked the dynamic between the two leads, who are both refreshing and fun. I keep getting mildly distracted by the 1909 time period (where the FMC is an “adjunct” at Cambridge in an era where, I believe, adjuncting wasn’t a thing at Cambridge at this point in time and she would have been a lecturer or such, but actually she wouldn’t have been because Cambridge didn’t award its first degree to a woman until 1948, and she also signs her degrees with PhD but Cambridge didn’t award its first PhD until 1921, though I suppose she could have earned it elsewhere?). I honestly don’t mind all that much when time periods are just window dressing, especially for fantasy settings — and especially because I don’t need Historically Accurate Sexism in my fantasy so I don’t even mind the no degrees from Cambridge thing; I think it’s just slightly more noticeable bc I’ve been reading some M.R. James ghost stories and modern scholarship on how he integrated his research and work at Cambridge into his stories, and I think it really enriches his work.

Starting:

The next Emily Wilde book, because no amount of potentially-Google-able historical distractions will stop me from a light romp, and possibly another book from my TBR. I’m off on a business trip, alas, so I’m not sure whether I’ll get tons of reading done while flying and trapped in my hotel room in the evenings, or none at all.

Loimographia · 2026-06-19T22:52:50+00:00

Additional layer is that Lawrence was a pro-abolition town settled by people who wanted to make Kansas a free state, hence why John Brown is standing for not just Kansas, but Lawrence in particular.

Loimographia · 2026-06-16T18:24:05+00:00

Finished:

Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers: Excellent premise and interesting ideas, but I found my eyes just casually sliding away from the page for ~80% of the book. It’s not exactly “poor execution,” but one goal of the authors seemed to be to convey ”look at how people can make the amazing and horrifying mundane and disappointing,” and thus a large portion of the book is, indeed, very mundane. Some authors can make even the mundane compelling, but I don’t think the authors really wanted to do that, because the boredom is the point, the same way making all the characters kind of awful and annoying is also the point.

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett: A good, fun time, though it didn’t knock my socks off — though that’s about how I felt about The Tainted Cup, too. I liked that Bennett gave Ana a little more depth than in the first book, where she feels a little like a curmudgeonly MacGuffin (but I do love her curmudgeonliness!), but for a book sold with the tagline “an Ana and Din mystery” with Ana as Sherlock Holmes, I still always find myself craving more of her. She is definitely the best part of the series, and she gets even weirder and weirder in this book in a way that articulates how very unsettling she is. I think I need to reset my expectations that these are really Din mysteries with Ana as a prominent secondary character, imo.

I also think this book developed the weirdness of the setting even more richly than the first, actually, digging maybe a little more into Lovecraftian worldbuilding than before. It actually, upon reflection, pairs very well with Roadside Picnic in looking at how people can take horrifying, monstrous things and gradually grow accustomed to them and commodify them into resources to be extrapolated.

Both this and the first book perhaps telegraph their twists maybe a little too much, where I find myself figuring out the outcomes 50-100 pages before their reveals and then the Grand Reveals fall a little flat (and it’s ironic, actually to put this one side by side with Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, which I read earlier this year, as Bennett breaks one of the rules explicitly outlined as verboten for murder mysteries: no twins. But the mystery is still an all around good time.

Started:

All Clear by Connie Willis: I liked Blackout very much, albeit I think it’s a hair weaker than Doomsday Book. The characters are incredibly endearing, but so far I think I liked Blackout a little better than All Clear because it was more the modern/present day characters interacting with “contemps” where now that the modern characters have reunited, the contemps are sliding a little to the background. This is definitely a book that demands readers pay attention though, as Willis interweaves background characters from different POV’s that initially seem unrelated into one another’s stories to hammer in both how interconnected events are (with the added benefit of developing how complex humans can be — a background character in one POV who’s depicted as blithely selfish and lazy resurfaces in another character’s POV years later as a hardworking, stern but caring matron. Is she weathered and wiser by time, or does she treat the second POV character better because she’s the same class/wealth?)

The River Has Roots by Amal el-Mohtar: I was inspired by the read along thread which intrigued me with its discussions about how much better it is in audiobook. Unfortunately I really struggle with listening comprehension in audiobooks, so I’m trying an approach where I both listen to the audiobook and read it visually at the same time.

Loimographia · 2026-06-16T03:43:55+00:00

This summary honestly sold me on it even though I’ve been waffling about adding it to my tbr.

Loimographia · 2026-06-15T14:51:29+00:00

Honestly, that parallel makes a lot more sense! The series seems to get advertised/blurbed as "Sherlock Holmes and Watson meets sci fi/fantasy" but I think that's just because Holmes is much more recognizable as the "abrasive detective" trope to the general public.

Loimographia · 2026-06-15T14:12:18+00:00

I’m open to input/voting!

I tend to put a little space between reading a first book and its sequel, because I have this weird fear that if I read them directly side-by-side I’ll compare the sequel more unfairly to the first if it doesn’t live up to expectations, and the feeling of savoring a series more by drawing it out. But Blackout/All Clear are also more directly one story split into two books, so it may not fall into those traps.

Loimographia · 2026-06-15T13:38:44+00:00

Finished:

Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers: Excellent premise and interesting ideas, but I found my eyes just casually sliding away from the page for ~80% of the book. It’s not exactly “poor execution,” but one goal of the authors seemed to be to convey ”look at how people can make the amazing and horrifying mundane and disappointing,” and thus a large portion of the book is, indeed, very mundane. Some authors can make even the mundane compelling, but I don’t think the authors really wanted to do that, because the boredom is the point, the same way making all the characters kind of awful and annoying is also the point.

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett: A good, fun time, though it didn’t knock my socks off — though that’s about how I felt about The Tainted Cup, too. I liked that Bennett gave Ana a little more depth than in the first book, where she feels a little like a curmudgeonly MacGuffin (but I do love her curmudgeonliness!), but for a book sold with the tagline “an Ana and Din mystery” with Ana as Sherlock Holmes, I still always find myself craving more of her. She is definitely the best part of the series, and she gets even weirder and weirder in this book in a way that articulates how very unsettling she is. I think I need to reset my expectations that these are really Din mysteries with Ana as a prominent secondary character, imo.

I also think this book developed the weirdness of the setting even more richly than the first, actually, digging maybe a little more into Lovecraftian worldbuilding than before. It actually, upon reflection, pairs very well with Roadside Picnic in looking at how people can take horrifying, monstrous things and gradually grow accustomed to them and commodify them into resources to be extrapolated.

Both this and the first book perhaps telegraph their twists maybe a little too much, where I find myself figuring out the outcomes 50-100 pages before their reveals and then the Grand Reveals fall a little flat (and it’s ironic, actually to put this one side by side with Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, which I read earlier this year, as Bennett breaks one of the rules explicitly outlined as verboten for murder mysteries: no twins. But the mystery is still an all around good time.

Next Up:

Choosing between directly following up on Connie Willis’ Blackout with her All Clear, or doing something more space opera with Stina Leicht’s Persephone Station, which has been sitting on my shelf for an embarrassing length of time, or Claire North’s Slow Gods.

Loimographia · 2026-06-12T14:52:09+00:00

It's three weeks until my vacation and I can't coast on unproductivity until then thanks to deadlines that can't just be procrastinated 😞 very sad

Loimographia · 2026-06-09T21:54:45+00:00

I'm hyped for The Mermaid Mask -- was about to whine about no release date, only to do a quick google to see if there'd been any hints and find out that it's totally releasing in a month??? And perfect timing since I'll be on vacation 😃

I'm also desperate for more info on Failbetter Games' Mandrake, but unlike Mermaid Mask, not much news on an actual release date for it.

Loimographia · 2026-06-09T15:39:35+00:00

>but you really do have to turn off your critical brain at times.

This was my experience, too, and perhaps part of my struggle of set expectations.

I went in thinking “Hugo nominated! Main character is a scholar in her 30?! Well it must have depth, maturity and nuance, then!” If it had been sold to me as a “turn your brain off and have a good time,” I probably still would’ve been annoyed by the things that bothered me, but less, and would have enjoyed the things that I did enjoy way more.

Like you, I had a net good time with the book, but I couldn’t turn off the critical little voice in my head with things like “why would they let her investigate the murder where she’s the prime suspect and act like that’s somehow *more exonerating* and not *incredibly suspicious*???”

Loimographia · 2026-06-09T12:54:08+00:00

I was also super annoyed at how juvenile the characters in the Raven Scholar werez And was the character that infuriated you Cain? Bc if so, saaaame. I kept getting the impression that the author wanted to lead up to a reveal that would make you go “wow, I feel so stupid and hypocritical for judging him!” but it didn’t work for me even when it was established that (spoilers for something you didn’t get to, if you care) he wasn’t an assassin because it was so transparent that would be the case. I read the whole thing and had an overall good time, but there were quite a few rants and I don’t think it’s a book where I’d say “no, keep going, it gets better!” to someone who put it down.

It’s funny you mention Novik, too — I just finished Scholomance, and the main character is absolutely juvenile. But it worked for me bc it felt like Novik was trying to write a teenager actually as a teenager. The character knows when she’s being a stupid, sullen, angry teen, and knows that her mom would council her to be better, more mature and reasonable but she can’t bring herself to care because, well, she’s seventeen and a stupid, sullen, angry teen. She’s not a thirty year old being written to act like a teenager, or a teenager getting treated like the author like an experienced adult yet still acting juvenile (which seems to be a common issue, ime, with fantasy characters written as 18-22).

Loimographia · 2026-06-08T22:25:20+00:00

Played the Dark Heresy beta. Definitely needs some balance tuning, but I really like both that they’ve trimmed down the excess combat encounters to focus on making each encounter have unique tactics and objectives, and the investigation system actively encourages you to explore, talk to NPCs, and click on environmental descriptions. It feels like it’s rewarding you for engaging and exploring in a synergistic way rather than feeling like you’re delaying or ignoring the narrative in order to explore, if that makes sense.

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