Akiva Reads

Hello Darling, Are You Working?

2026-07-02T00:00:00-04:00

by Rupert Everett

I bought this 1992 ARC at a used bookstore, probably for $0.99 in June 2015 if the sticker is anything to go by. That seems right. I finally picked it up off my shelf yesterday because it's toooo hoooot outside and I wanted to read something silly and low stakes.

It is silly, so that was a success, but there's serious emotional stakes too. I was tempted to tag it "historical" because it's so firmly situated in 1987. A year before I was born, so I don't know, maybe he got it all wrong, but it felt real to me. Depicts a midcentury gay identity that's all tangled up with transfemininity, and coming into the anxious hangover of AIDS and 1980s work and money culture. It resonated with the "dethroning the queen" chapter of A Short History of Trans Misogyny, which I've been too hot and tired to finish.

It's a satire, it's a bit free with various prejudices, but it does manage to get most of the ridicule focused on upper class Brits (and whatever a Hooray is?), with a sideline in wealthy Americans. Even so, I was somehow rooting for every character. It reminded me of Flashman in the satire and the extreme Britishness of it all, but I could barely read Flashman because he was too horrible to root for. I don't know how you tweak the recipe to come up with one or the other. Something about Rhys and co being incompetent in ways that hurt both themselves and others, but also frequently generous to each other for no reason? (It would probably help if I had read Flashman less than 20 years ago.)

The ink drawings are cute and add to the story. Rhys really is a grown up Eloise, who's discovered sex and drugs and that somebody eventually has to pay for the room service.

The end is weird and arty. Would have liked a few more scenes touching on the dream, but I think Everett didn't know what to do with it either.

I was going to say 3/5 but I think I've talked myself into 4/5. It doesn't look like Everett ever wrote another of these, which is a bummer! Wonder if there's fanfic.

Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)

2026-06-06T00:00:00-04:00

by Ann Leckie

6 June 2026

I still think about this book pretty often, but I realized recently it's been a minute (or... nine years???) since I last read it.

Easy stuff first: still a 5-star rating from me, still one of my favorite books of all time.

I had forgotten the intense moral complexity of the book. The characters have participated in truly awful things---killing a single person in self defense as Breq does early on is a bit hard to register next to the extrajudicial execution of dozens of arrested civillian prisoners, slaving the bodies of defeated enemies to a warship AI, colonization and dispossession and the many kinds and degrees of violence needed to implement them, or committing genocide on a solar-system scale.

"'Here's the truth: luxury always comes at someone else's expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn't generally have to see that, if one doesn't wish.'"

(As a warship, Justice of Toren does have to see that. It knows every single ugly detail because it's a piece of equipment, no task too lowly, but also because of its many bodies/viewpoints, superhuman processing power and memory storage, and two thousand years of experiences.)

Breq and Seivarden are both dealing with the fact that their old worlds are dead. They have to choose what to give up on and what they can still cling to. When Strigan offers to undo Breq's sense of self as an ancillary and try to return her to her pre-Justice of Toren self, she rejects it as a death: "'You can kill me, you mean. You can destroy my sense of self and replace it with one you approve of.'" But at the same time, Breq is not giving up on a self that is arguably just as extinguished: she can't be the same person she was as a many-bodied AI. From later in that same long conversation: "'Which me are you talking to? Which life that was denied me do you intend I live?'"

Breq returns over and over to the story of the human One Amaat One soldier who resisted illegal orders. I saw it in a few places that Breq doesn't explicitly reference it either, such as when she jumps off the bridge for Seivarden: "Falling, I still didn't know why I had done it. But at the moment of choice I had found I couldn't walk away."

Small things:

The Presger probably have Translators because the Radchaai have a Translators Office, they were like "well, guess this is how humans Do Things"
I had the idea at one point that occupants of the-Radch-the-Dyson-sphere might use universally "he" pronouns, and I can't shake it. I've also wondered if Anaander Miaanai is a self-exile from that part of the Radch due to rules about impurity of technology-augmented human bodies.
One Esk Nineteen: one and Esk are both beginnings, nineteen out of twenty is almost an ending... but not quite.

7 August 2017

Always Be Rereading. It's telling that almost everyone who dislikes this book also doesn't understand that Breq is an unreliable narrator of her own feelings. Yes, she thinks she's a stone-cold killing machine, but her actions say otherwise.

20 July 2016

Finished my first (of probably many) rereads. still kind of confusing, but always breathtaking.

19 June 2016

Finally bought a copy at Kramerbooks this evening so I can mark it up to my hearts content on the reread and then finally (FINALLY) get to reading the sequel!

November 2014

I think I forgot to review Ancillary Justice because it was so great. When I finished it a few months ago I wanted to write a long, insightful review and mention even half the things I loved about it, and then I had to return it to the library, with dozens of tiny scraps of paper still sticking out of the places where I bookmarked the things I was excited about.

I'm just going to need to get my own copy, so I can underline and annotate to my heart's content.

In short: best feminist gender-fucking hard sci fi about imperialism/colonialism/militarism and artificial intelligences and religion and culture with the best intense political intrigue for a plot and the best characters of 2014. Absolute win.

The Oven

2026-05-28T00:00:00-04:00

by Sophie Goldstein

Mendoza in Hollywood (The Company, #3)

2026-05-27T00:00:00-04:00

by Kage Baker

Torn between 3 and 4/5. There are so many things I enjoy about this series: secret alternate history, little conspiracy theories everywhere, fitting the sci fi timeline in among things I have always wished were knowable, like prehistorical human culture + the people of the Americas pre-conquest.... I like Mendoza's botany talk and observations of humans mortal and immortal, much as she doesn't like them.... And yet her lover I just find so ???? - I don't get his appeal. I don't like him much, or find him interesting (although this book finally added a little intrigue/mystery, yay) which makes it hard to understand why she makes such weird decisions when it comes to him.

It's weird that I've accidentally read three books about Los Angeles in the last 3 weeks ([b:ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines|44280584|ELADATL A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines|Sesshu Foster|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617074287l/44280584.SY75.jpg|68794083] , [b:Light from Uncommon Stars|56179360|Light from Uncommon Stars|Ryka Aoki|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1626721795l/56179360.SY75.jpg|80834645] , and this) and none of them gave me the least desire to travel there. I often find it useful to read bad reviews of books I'm considering reading, because it gives me a sense of what other people are getting out of them and if I would find that thing annoying or if it would be exactly my cup of tea. This felt like three authors giving me their pitches for what sucks about Los Angeles but also what they get out of it and what ultimately makes it interesting and worthwhile to them, and it all sounds awful to me. Except maybe the food in Light from Uncommon Stars, and even then....

Back on topic, the food in this was a well-done running gag that also gave its touch of characterization to each of the immortals. I really enjoyed the serial feel of the whole novel - I can't recall if other Mendoza books have had that feel, or if this was a special format to fit the Hollywood theme.

Light from Uncommon Stars

2026-05-22T00:00:00-04:00

by Ryka Aoki

At first I thought this was going to be too dark for me, then I realized it was going to be too saccharine. I slogged through to page 50. I paused and read a couple dozen 4-5 star reviews from people whose opinions I generally find valuable and was even more confused. I ended up skimming very quickly through a lot of the book looking for anything that would catch me, and didn't find it. Sometimes I would count that as "read" but in this case I'm going for "did not finish" because I didn't invest that much and so I can't say if the investment would have been returned.

Confessions of the Fox

2026-05-18T00:00:00-04:00

by Jordy Rosenberg

You can practically smell this book, which is particularly noticeable coming back to it after tearing through a KJ Charles book that took place maybe 50-75 years later. (Lol what is English history, actually I don't know the time difference. I'm sure London still smelled horrible in the early-mid 1800s.)

I didn't like this quite as much as I had expected to, maybe because of the level of theory but maybe also because some of the stuff you just have to accept at the beginning doesn't pay off, or become justified from a Watsonian perspective, til much later. For ex: why are the footnotes being added in chronological order? Or: what is all this random magical realism doing here?

Awkward to read pandemic conspiracy theories coming from a communist perspective published in 2018. Oh well.....

How to Fake It in Society

2026-05-17T00:00:00-04:00

by K.J. Charles

Beautifully constructed plot!

ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines

2026-05-12T00:00:00-04:00

by Sesshu Foster, Arturo Ernesto Romo

I FINISHED IT. I didn't think that was going to happen but then my puzzle-solving brain kicked in and I couldn't leave it alone.

I am a huge fan of epistolary/documentary stories, stuff where you have to make the connections, etc. The biggest problem here is that this isn't one. It doesn't respect the premise or play fair. The short stories don't actually make sense as documents, mayyyybe the first one at a stretch, but it (like a few other pieces) is a dozen pages of dialogue with no speaker markings and also the voices (of a young female communist learning to pilot and an older male anarchist teaching her) are totally indistinguishable, and also wtf this is not how any human has ever talked to any other human. The repetitive writing style, complete with frequent long poetic lists, are deeply annoying and pad the book out to a length it doesn't need or deserve. The graphics pages (photos, drawings, notes) are pretty but add nothing to the story. The appendixes are more like it! Too bad you're already at the end of the book at that point.

On a political level, the idea that ELADATL is a utopian project in a dystopian post-apocalyptic landscape is badly undercut by the fact that almost everyone associated with ELADATL is depicted as utterly incompetent grandstanders who spend most of their energy on violent infighting. There are maybe two scenes where the government/oppressive powers do anything oppressive. I came around to it a bit eventually, maybe that's meant to be an accurate picture of what it looks like when the government has completely given up and left its people at the mercy of the environment (less active oppression and more absence), and goodness knows that activist groups can be dysfunctional.

The story is 0% interested in science or speculation, so it fails as sci fi or spec fic. The interest seems to be in how one can communicate scientific vibes without any substance, which I guess could be a stab at social criticism?

Biggest complaint, on top of all that: the back copy says it's hilarious. It is not, I cannot remember a single time I cracked a smile. Maybe the fact that one of the main figures is named Swirling Wheelnuts is supposed to make me laugh? IDK, I was too busy trying to figure out if that was an epithet, and then the moment was past.

If you're interested, you will probably get more out of this fantastic essay on the real and fictional Oscar Zeta Acosta that I found while googling character names to see which is a clever reference and which I need to pay attention to: evergreenreview.com/read/the-marginalization-of-oscar-zeta-acosta/

Will consider uploading my index of character names later, in case it helps anyone.

Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries, #8)

2026-05-12T00:00:00-04:00

by Martha Wells

Starting so extremely in media res made it a bit hard to catch my breath. Altho I think MB feels the same, ao.

A Death in Tokyo (Detective Kaga, #3)

2026-05-05T00:00:00-04:00

by Keigo Higashino, Giles Murray

China Mountain Zhang

2026-05-03T00:00:00-04:00

by Maureen F. McHugh

Can't BELIEVE it took me so long to finally read this, one of the best books I've read in a long while and so exactly the kind of book I love. Political but with wonderful characters, alternate history, not utopian or dystopian but has both real stakes and real hope, exploring identity and community....

Also now I can finally stop mentally confusing the title with the author China Mieville.

Second Chances in New Port Stephen

2026-05-03T00:00:00-04:00

by T.J. Alexander

Skim-read, not sure why. I don't find anything funny or charming about Christmas kitsch and that's pretty much required for this one.

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

2026-04-24T00:00:00-04:00

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Fumi Nakamura

I would have liked this better had I not read several very similar books already. It would have had to go way above and beyond to stand out, and it didn't. 2.5 rounded up because this feels like a me problem.

Shopping Cart Pantheism

2026-04-23T00:00:00-04:00

by Jeanne Randolph

I love a short weird book but this is 85% Christianity and Freud, two topics I notoriously don't give a fuck about. I think if you title a book "pantheism" it should contain SOME kind of religious reference other than Christians and Christianity and Christian philosophy. (2-3 stray uses of "Judeo-Christian" is MORE points off, not fewer.)

A handful of tidbits that I found interesting, not sure I really deeply understood how they fitted into the argument because, see above, don't care enough.

post-apocalyptic regression - a culture absolutely losing its balance after a series of major apocalypses. Even more relevant now than it was when this was written (2009?) and published (2015).
"the human psyche is a system , a system like hydraulics: 'force that is applied at one point is transmitted to another point using an incompressible fluid.'"
"'A society which says for itself the goal of increasing is supply of good will tend, inevitably, to identify all innovation with addition to, changes in, or increase in the stock of goods.'" Made me think about eco-consumer products, which is not what author was talking about.

Oh but by the end it becomes clear that despite all this chatter about leaning into consumerism as a religion, Randolph actually DOESN'T buy the stuff she's obsessed with (random plastic shit in Japan was her example I think?) and actually her watch is from a thrift store in the 1970s and her hankie from her grandma and she's actually really cool and not wasteful or problematic!!

1.5 rounded down to 1 because it's a fairly pointless book and I don't rec it, not out of particular animosity.

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport

2026-04-19T00:00:00-04:00

by Samit Basu

Page 75/chapter 7. The infodumps do not stop coming, and I do not want to read a 400 page book told mostly in infodumps while I also don't like the way the characters talk to each other. Am I supposed to be rooting for Lina when everything she says is so artificial and insincere, especially her apologies? In the hands of a more skilled writer there could be fun stuff to do with the omniscient narrator also being a character in the story, but if what I've seen so far is representative, Basu doesn't pull it off.

Gilded Cage (Lilywhite Boys, #2)

2026-04-16T00:00:00-04:00

by K.J. Charles

Hijab Butch Blues

2026-04-06T00:00:00-04:00

by Lamya H.

Came for the butch memoir, stayed for the beautifully written midrash, got my lights punched out by that last chapter on Yunus/Jonah and rage at injustice and picking your battles not being the same thing as giving up. (Guess what I'm going to be talking about in therapy.

Biography of X

2026-03-21T00:00:00-04:00

by Catherine Lacey

Turns out I can get into an emotionally stressful book about people in bad marriages behaving badly as long as it's got a strong plot and interesting mystery and takes place in a fascinating alternate universe.

The Thirty Names of Night

2026-03-14T00:00:00-04:00

by Zeyn Joukhadar

Probably good art, but I didn't enjoy it. The lavish prose and magical realism were just annoying to read, and I closed it with relief. Several overdone parallels and coincidences, but one of the early central ones (main character's graffiti habit) completely fizzles out. Duolingo Arabic was very helpful.

The Deep Dark

2026-03-10T00:00:00-04:00

by Lee Knox Ostertag

Yes.

Stag Dance

2026-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

by Torrey Peters

Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime

2026-02-28T00:00:00-05:00

by Alex Espinoza

I want just a little more editing for this. Hard to put my finger on why most of the time (a slightly awkward wording here and there, a sentence that's just a little too convoluted, an occasional clunky transition), but on p. 117 I feel pretty confident that someone should have marked "not even the all-pervasive specter of death" for more attention.

A bit all over the place, many tones, from high theory-speak to ethnographic interview to memoir to pop history. Doesn't not work but it's not the most cohesive (and it made me not buy the theory-speak at all).

Interior Chinatown

2026-01-28T00:00:00-05:00

by Charles Yu

Weird and feelings-y. I liked the weird a lot, the Divorced Straight Man parts were a little much for me personally, I just don't have a lot of interest/patience for that in Literature.

The City We Became (Great Cities, #1)

2026-01-10T00:00:00-05:00

by N.K. Jemisin

Enjoyed this much more than I expected; I have struggled with Jemisin's goriness before, but this was more my speed. I was really impressed with the subtlety until about 60 pages in, when we got 1. some rather explainy trans stuff, and then 2. a villain monologue spelling out the things that were already pretty clear, so I had to adjust my expectations down a bit. From there: yes, I thought it was good, and I will read the next ones.

A Trans Man Walks into a Gay Bar

2026-01-09T00:00:00-05:00

by Harry Nicholas

About 40% of this is good and specific and personal and well written... and the other 60% is the worst most boring and self-righteous trans 101, complete with footnotes linking to webpages. (I would have to check if Nicholas ever cited a book---I don't think so, though.) I can imagine exactly how and why this happened: needs a wider audience than just trans people, maybe needs a bit more length, etc. etc. The filler was so painful to read that I had to skim, but every time I was ready to give up there'd be another bit that actually was original and interesting. So, uh, IDK, take from that what you will. The 40% is very good, I just wish this was a zine or a pamphlet or something.

(Disclaimer: I don't know if I'm getting those percentages right, but that is how it felt to read.)