Reading Update

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Read it because I heard it was about lesbian necromancers in space, loved it utterly because of its protagonist, Gideon, who is not a necromancer but is A. very much a lesbian B. an excellent swordswoman C. a messed-up eighteen-year old who's had a very unfair go of it D. snarky as hell with several heroic bones (ha!) in her body E. looks like this

Gideon's is such a wonderful headspace to be in. I love how irreverent she is, that she gets (physically) fucked up a bunch in this novel, and that despite the little kindness shown to her on the Ninth, as soon as she meets the other necros and cavs from the other houses, she so badly wants to protect them. I will save more raving about Gideon for the spoiler cut.

This was just a fun novel to read. I finished most of it in a single night, the prose has this wild energy to it, I loved the silly fantasy roles and titles, the hints of details on all the different Houses with the purposes they serve in the Empire. My Classification Id was happy. The necromancer-cavalier setup is perfect for a billion different takes on loyalty kink or lack thereof, and the book definitely makes use of that.

(Also, I could sense the Homestuck vibes and I was here for it.)

Spoilery thoughts below!

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The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History by Marc Stein

A well-assembled collection of primary sources about and contextualizing the Stonewall Riots. The introduction does a great job of offering a variety of angles by which one could interpret the riots in light of larger historical trends around it, which I always like. Stein bounded himself to sources from several years before the riots and several years after; sources from within the US but not solely within NYC; mostly articles from gay periodicals and societies, other than court case summaries and a few mainstream reports of the riots themselves. That last point was interesting because it hadn't been his initial decision - the cost of reproducing more mainstream sources turned out to be prohibitive, but as he says, that was a happy accident that let him focus more on LGBTQ folks' words themselves.

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