taste

Finished City of Last Chances. It never told me why the Reproach became what it is. I had hoped it never would.

Wish granted.

And yet — I need to buy the sequel, because I want to know: why did the chief ghost become a Rat King? Why has the Rat King got a masked body now? Is he doomed to fight for Ilmar for eternity? Is he cursed to live an eternity in blissful delusion? Will he ever get the girl?

Until next time...

A third into City of Last Chances. The Reproach is my favourite district. A fantasy village inside the city, lived in by ghosts who think they live in a fantasy village.

The folklore isn't accidental. They wrote it. They keep telling it. The door is open. They are standing in front of it telling each other a story about a door that isn't there.

The book hasn't told me why yet. I am hoping it never does.

In The Spear Cuts Through Water, Keema's lola — his grandmother, telling him the story as she's dying — calls it a love story. I read it thinking she was being generous.

The love in it is mostly broken. Misguided. Sacrificial. Love that isn't love but wears the clothes. Plans made in good faith and turned. The kind a war is, sometimes.

Love is like water. Ebbs, flows, evaporates, deluges again. It doesn't stay in the shape you poured it into.

Mostly this book is a desert. Not water. The only thing close to love is the ending: the people who paid for everything are handed back to themselves, wounds and shame and judgment intact. The lola wasn't being generous. She was being precise. I feel like I invested a lot of time to be disappointed with its version of love.

Barnes & Noble in the States, flight to catch, no chunky book in the carry-on — I'd left Onyx Storm at home, which was its own small fiasco. Asked ChatGPT, like everyone now does and almost no one admits, to point me at something good and not weepy.

Walked out with four books. Found out later, talking to a different AI, that all four are polyphonic — voices interrupting each other inside a single paragraph, sometimes a single sentence. ChatGPT never said the word. It just knew the shape.

I picked two of them — City of Last Chances and The Overstory — without asking. Half the haul was just me, then.

The AI didn't choose a book for me. It made my taste visible to me, faster than I'd have got there alone. Help isn't the right word for what that is. Mirror is closer.