baru cormorant ii

Taking a break from snowflake_challenge because my body has apparently decided that, now that it's being shoehorned into a 9-5 again, Shut Down time is approximately 9pm.

Baru Cormorant continuing to be an exceptionally good read. Calculating empire, and not calculating it right sits so well on my palate: at first I was afraid Baru was going to just... do up all the numbers and succeed. Instead I'm somewhere neck-deep in politics and surrounded by female characters that I don't automatically find myself internally fridging away, the way my reading-brain has been trained to do. Awful but real is the gut instinct to distrust or disregard anything woman: I'm struggling, this year, to make sure I read more books by women, read more books with women. Why am I having to teach myself not to look down upon something I am – well, I know why. And it's frightening.

In other news:

• Gym membership! All the money in the world but by god am I going to get back on the bike. It has squash courts! Squash courts.


• The world's most adorable fountain pen, which I need to review


• The Lies of Locke Lamora, also going well, and in audiobook format, oddly for me