What I'm Reading: August 2025

RPG blogging may resume soon; there’s another Drowned Isles playtest wrapping up next week and I have some thoughts. Crucially: the game works, I have fun running it, and my friends have fun playing it. I’m excited to get to work through all the adventures I’ve accumulated over the last couple years.

But for today I’m here to talk about what I’ve read from April through mid-July. (I’m actually pretty backlogged and will be including July and August’s reading in some early fall catchup post instead.)

Books

• Little Fish, by Cacey Plett: We follow a 30-something trans woman who has just learned her Mennonite grandfather may have been a closeted trans woman. Unfortunately this didn’t do a lot for me. Partly I think I struggled to grab onto any of the characters, and the plot is sort of meandering? I read it curled up on a rainy late-spring weekend, which was a nice experience though.
• Stag Dance, by Torrey Peters: The largest, strongest man in an illegal logging camp is a little too enthusiastic to take on the role of a woman at the titular dance. Things sort of go off the rails from there. This is the good shit. I think this is the only transfem novel I know of set before “trans woman” was invented as a social category? Peters is really adept at writing dysphoria and social messiness, and I had a great time following her usual style into a very different genre.
• The West Passage, by Jared Pechacek: I described this to a friend as “fairytale Dark Souls” and I stand by that. We follow two characters raised in a sprawling ruined castle: one young girl who has come into the leadership of the funerary Grey Tower too early, and one young man whose master failed to induct him as the new Guardian before she died. The history of the castle, its towers, its massive Ladies (who wield reality-warping powers), and the great threat it faces have become obscured by the long passage of time. There’s a classical adventure story feel; lots of weird vignettes with imaginary characters or situations a la The Wizard of Oz. I really enjoyed this! It’s probably my favorite fantasy fiction this year.
• Boys Weekend, by Mattie Lubchansky: A graphic novel that follows a newly(-ish) out transfem on a trip to their friend’s bachelor party in a parody of Las Vegas and hypercapitalism. Really good, if you like her other work you’ll like this and vice-versa.
• House of Suns, by Alistair Reynolds: Humans have settled the whole galaxy despite being bound by the speed of light. Our protagonists hail from a Line, a loose organization of semi-immortal clones who make a circuit around the Milky Way and meet up once a circuit. They see civilizations and entire ways of human life rise and fall as they avoid getting too bogged down in the cycle of stellar empires. Unfortunately, that description is more interesting than the plot, which revolves around a somewhat tedious intrigue. Disappointed in the cis-het-ness of it all, given that gender variance among the clones is clear but unremarked on.
• Any Other City, by Hazel Jane Plante: Like Plante’s previous work, Little Blue Encyclopedia, this is a very formally playful book. In it a fictional writer, Hazel Jane Plante, co-writes a memoir by the fictional rockstar Tracy St Cyr. We visit St Cyr as a young “man” exploring Paris, art, and his relationship to a group of trans artists he admires. We then hop forward decades as she returns, post-transition and a well-loved indie rocker recovering from an abusive, traumatic breakup. Enjoyable throughout, often touching, and a novel-ass-novel.
• A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett: Did you like last year’s A Tainted Cup? Did you wish it was sort of… worse in every way but still decent? Well, Bennett has just the thing. The mystery here is cloudy and not as satisfying, the characters are less interesting, and the overall meta-mysteries of the setting are basically not explored. But I do like seeing Ana and Din pingpong around and overall had some good pulpy fun.

Things that Aren’t Books

A bonus section, with a film and a video game.

• Do the Right Thing: After a hot, hot day out and about the city my partner and I made it home to our apartment just across the Hudson River. For movie night I offered xyr a choice: Do the Right Thing or Escape from New York; xe picked the former. I knew going in this was “a movie about a heat wave and a riot”; what I didn’t realize is that it was a tight character study about a single block in Brooklyn. We come to know (and in some cases love) a few dozen characters and their relationships with each other before things reach a proverbial boiling point. (I do think the treatment of women in the film is… messy? But that’s not unusual at all for Hollywood).
• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown: Due to market pressures and capital crunch (or whatever), I feel like games have been bifurcating into no-budget indie storytelling darlings and hyper-budget AAA tech demos. That’s why it caught me off guard to be playing a Hollow-Knight-inspired Metroidvania coming from one of the few major publishing houses left (Ubisoft). The basic game feel of hopping around is pretty good, the combat system is surprisingly deep for this kind of game, and the upgrades you get throughout are inventive (lots of time manipulation and teleportation, which fits the franchise). Also it’s like the first game ever to be dubbed in Farsi? It took me a little while to get into the story but when I realized it was Prince of Persia by way of a shonen battle anime, things clicked into place. Would be my game of the year, if not for a little architecture-themed puzzle game that I’ll write about in my next post.