All this "the baby this, the baby that" annoys me. It's been two days since you had sex; vision or no vision, Messiah or no Messiah, the fertilized egg hasn't even completed its way to the uterus 🙄
#books2026 — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #books2026, aggregated by home.social.
-
"Those Israelis have great tech. I'm thinking about converting. Do you think they'd let an AI be a Jew?"
Oh I'd LOVE to see THAT rabbinical debate!
(There is the circumcision thing though 🤔)
-
"I'd asked for the Bible with the hope of feeling less like a stranger, to find some comfort in what was supposed to be the center of my spiritual life."
Just to get this straight, as a pretty new Catholic: we™ never had read the Bible, but it's the center of our™ spirituality? Okay.
(Also: HOW can she not be curious?! Her partner said he wrote in the Bible, explaining his thoughts and actions! They're directly related to her case! WTF?!)
-
"I'm a Catholic, Danny. You know we never read that thing," I said, pushing the Bible back at him."
😂😂😂
-
"Angels, real angels, were nothing like those harp-strumming, navel-gazing, billowing-winged clichés. [...] There was a majesty about him, but it was nothing Sunday school had ever prepared me for."
Sexy angels, gah, but wait. She was a Catholic, right? Do American Catholics do Sunday school? I only know that as an old-fashioned protestant thing.
(European Catholics probably would encounter both stern Renaissance and fat Baroque angels in art 😅)
-
"Of course. The first time the Torah talks about angels, they're just 'messengers.' They come into the Israelite camp and have food and drink, like regular men. I think those kinds of angels exist. I might even be an angel like that to someone sometime. You never know when you're doing God's work."
💙
-
"I dusted off my King James version of the Bible, my copy of the Torah, the Koran, and a whole slew of other religious books"
It's always so weird that the KJV is felt to be the most basic and holy version for English speakers, something you return to when you want REAL answers (and can read neither biblical Hebrew nor Koine Greek, I guess).
-
"With the inaccessibility of birth control and abortions, the lack of treatment for STDs, the social stigma of being or having a child out of wedlock-well, honestly, I was in the minority. Many people took vows to abstain until marriage; many people kept them."
Nah. Not buying it. These conditions have been the case for most of human history, and most people didn't abstain.
-
"A lot of men in my life didn't know how to express the combination of exasperation and attraction I seemed to inspire in them, especially since I lived my life outside the rigid bounds of "happy homemaker.""
Manic Pixie Dream Girl much...?!
Plus I can't believe* we got angel-infused brain implants and there are STILL rigid bounds of female expression.
*I totally can but don't WANT TO
-
"Danny never believed in the LINK-angels. He always said if they were a sign from God, the true God, why did they only appear to the affluent-those connected by expensive wetware? Daniel convinced me, Jesus was a man for the poor, the outcast. Why would God only talk to the rich? It seemed like a major change in policy."
-
"Human beings were funny that way: exceedingly inventive and lazy as hell. Old things remained-built over, built around. Living literally in the shadow and underneath the shiny new skyscrapers in Manhattan, ancient crotchety buildings like my office still stood, mostly unchanged since the nineteenth century."
I'd call that sustainable instead of lazy, but then, I'm not American, and know people living in houses that were built in the 15th century 😅
-
"The Malachim?" The Hasidic terrorists went by the code name Malachim Nikamah, the Angels of Vengeance. He nodded. I raised my eyebrows, but held my tongue. It made sense. The Malachim were renowned hackers and the LINK was what they terrorized. They shared Michael's distaste for Letourneau's bid for messiah, and disbelief in the divinity of the LINK-angels."
Now I am getting "Unsong" vibes and wish this was told from a Jewish or other non-Christian perspective.
-
Interesting that these "angels" appear in a tech gadget and are claimed as their own by Christianity (and/or Judaism? Islam? It isn't clear yet).
These days, "an AI told me" is basically treated as "an angel if God told me" by many people, but it's not Christianity that profits off that, but companies.
The tech bros are missing here, at least so far. It's all megachurches and the pope. Very different from our world.
-
"Anyone else not on the LINK was either a dissenter or couldn't afford the process."
What a culture of "always connected" does to those who can't or won't connect to the net is a great thing to investigate!
And very timely, given "digital only" services, age restrictions for social media and cash cards that only pay for certain services for people on welfare or asylum seekers.
-
New book: Lyda Morehouse, "Archangel Protocol". Near-future cyberpunk with humans having implants that claim to do God's will.
Recommended by someone (@irina?) here who found it too dystopian but thought I'd maybe like it.
The premise certainly does sound like my thing!
-
One review of "An Unkindness of Ghosts" complained that there are "no good, sympathetic white characters" in it.
My sibling in reading books...
There actually *are* white people who are helpful, or kind, or just nice. But they're still not portrayed as sympathetic, because why would they? They're part of an oppressive, racist society, and our Black protagonists can't forget that. It taints every interaction.
My sibling, please sit with this discomfort.
-
"An Unkindness of Ghosts" by Rivers Solomon. A generation ship story, but so much more; a haunting, brutal, beautifully and vividly written, tale of slavery and freedom, oppression and heritage.
We, through our protagonist Aster, are on the "Mathilda", fleeing Earth since hundreds of years.
The ship is organized like a plantation-style slave society: white upper-deckers live in comfort, PoC low-deckers work the fields and live in crowded quarters.
(1/n)
-
This book neither shies away from the brutality of life nor from the beauty of it. Community, nourishing, flavorful food, and stories reaching back generations among Aster's family are just as much a part of it as random brutality. Aster not reading social cues right leads to beatings; her friend Giselle being traumatized leads to questionable choices and hurtful behavior.
(3/n)
-
Aster, who is strongly coded as autistic and intersex, and possibly also some flavor of trans, is a young Black person training, somewhat informally, in medicine; she's also doing botanical research and trying to solve the mystery of her mother's death in addition to farm labor. This mystery turns out to be connected to things being wrong with the "Mathilda" herself, and leads to plans of escape while a ruler dies and revolt and chaos loom.
(2/n)
-
It's the pattern of life; it's how almost nothing can stamp out life; and nothing of it is told from the oppressor's perspective.
A hard read, but a powerful one; a story that pulled me in and fully immersed me; a protagonist I could identify with. Read it if you can deal with the horrors and violence.
(4/n, n=4)
-
Review: "why does this have to be a slave society? That is inefficient and makes no sense on a generation ship"
Well.
This is an alternate history. They were a racist society built on slave labor, and they took it with them when they left Earth. Why wouldn't they, it's a lot easier to enforce when there's nowhere to run to.
And who cares about efficiency when this stuff is entwined with their religion?
(I think this is a "don't read the reviews" book)
-
"Opulent: adj., extravagant, overdone, rich.1 As in: second helpings of maize pudding, hot water from the tap, flannel bedding, walnut butter. [...] As Aster now entered E deck for the first time at the Surgeon’s side, word-meanings evolved once more [...]. Opulent was not a second helping of supper at all, but bronze statues of weeping angels, dresses so grand and full of fabric they quite easily could be sewed into five or even six dresses."
-
"She looked neither male nor female, but if one were to pick—and people so did like to pick—they would choose male, of that she was certain."
I think that is very close to the gender presentation I'd like to have 🤔
-
“Wiping me clean won’t help. Neither will patting me dry. Neither will feeding me or giving me water,” said Giselle. Aster understood. Those were all such small things in comparison to the disaster of Lieutenant at Matilda’s helm. Drops of goodness in a pool of fresh blood."
And yet. "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."
-
"I saved some supper for you. Made it into sandwiches so you can travel with them easily. Buttermilk plantain biscuits and braised goat curry,” said Aster"
I love these evocative descriptions of food, rare as they seem to be in science fiction ☺️
It's such an interesting setting. The high-tech generation ship. The plantation worker's culture and history. The quasi-feudal politics and the possibility of learning.
-
Aster repeatedly gets into situations where she could keep her head down and let the injustice go, but she... doesn't. Even though she lives under a totalitarian regime, where "keeping your head down" most often is a smart move.
And this is just so classic autistic behavior. You can't keep silent in these situations, you just CAN'T, not if someone is treated unfairly.
I empathize so much more than with Kelli's compliance.
-
"The Surgeon didn’t have white skin—whitish, but not white. It was close enough that plausible deniability had allowed him to keep his status when his true ancestry came to prominence during puberty. An upperdeck father, a lowdeck mother. Such children belonged, as Aster had heard a C deck woman once say, downstairs."
So much worldbuilding in there, so many remnants of an evil past.
-
Book synchronicity: another autistic protagonist who likes acting out stories as a kid and commits arson, like in "Ignore All Previous Instructions"! This one hasn't gone lawful good though, and hasn't quite left her low origins: she has strong family ties and still does the work they all do.
(I think race plays a role here.)
-
"We got a saying here in Tide Wing: Should is for weaklings. Why would we care about such a thing when already nothing is how it should be on this cursed ship?"