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“One Day After Saturday”

Macondo is a town with history, and this one is somewhat held together by its scatterbrained priest. The elaborate short story includes a widow who may have murdered her rich husband, a plague of dead birds falling from the sky, a young man who stopped off the train for a meal, and a sermon about the Wandering Jew, and has a completely ridiculous ending.

“Montiel’s Widow”

This is the first story that really binds the fabric of the town together, and if it is to be believed then Bathazar’s afternoon happens somewhere in the past. This is about the generational trauma of political upheavals as it is visited on the loved ones of the oppressors once they are no longer around to keep the people in line with fear.

“Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon”

A carpenter builds the most beautiful bird cage in the world and, without exactly intending to, sells it to a rich man in town, and then just about everyone enjoys in his good fortune. A lot of this collection appears to compare and contrast the attitudes of those who have wealth with those who do not. As in life, those with little money are doomed to spend it.

“There are No Thieves in /This/ Town”

A great story about an ineffectual thief and philanderer. I feel for Ana; her husband is a physical abuser and isn’t at all interested in her pregnancy and goes out to see an even younger teenage mother at night. The end doesn’t speak well for Ana’s future but it’s conclusive for Damaso in a way that none of the previous stories in here have been.

“One of These Days”

A mayor who i assume is corrupt comes to the dentist to have his tooth pulled. The core of the story revolves around the power imbalance, with the quiet but resentful dentist insisting on pulling the tooth without an anesthetic as his way of taking revenge for a horrific political crime that the mayor has committed.

“Tuesday Siesta”

This is a charming character sketch of a beleaguered mother and her daughter who come into town at the hottest part of the day in order to mourn their son / brother. There seems to be some strategy in arriving during the siesta so as to avoid being seen. The heat is palpable, and I’m thirsting for something more to this fleeting anecdote.

“No One Writes to the Colonel”

A tragicomedy that’s difficult to decipher, about two starving, bereaved parents who are keeping their dead son’s rooster so that it can perform at a cockfight. The colonel is a monolithic iceberg of dignity who has been waiting years for pension checks that will likely never come and whose best friend is obscenely wealthy (and, as you can guess, not much of a friend at all).

when I was about to start reading the 100 Years of Solitude I realized after a bit of research that Marquez had published quite a few works before then. this is my second stop on the buildup to tackling Marquez’s more-lauded works. This is a collection, pairing a novella with another (previously released together) group of short stories.

Umm I refuse to believe we are done with the ice faeries with some 10% of the book left but I’m also pretty new to this genre and I can believe in the importance of emotional resolution, starved though YA fantasy may be for it

lol well one awkward marriage proposal after another is probably par for the course. Idk how Emily gets out of this one but I suspect that it will involve the changeling, a kingly conflict with Bambleby, or both

Now that Bambleby has been more or less outed by Emily (like, her admitting to him everything she has suspected) and we are dealing with Fae dangers like the dead king’s tree, things are kind of picking up. I have no standard to compare this fae book against beyond what I’ve read in fairy tale compilations, B&N’s Irish collection coming first to my mind.

Of course I recognize that the core part of such a “grumpy romance” is the hope that we will each find someone who will love us and be interested in us no matter how grumpy we may be or however we decide to behave any given day, because that gives us the freedom to be who we feel we are, whatever that may mean in any particular moment.

In this universe, fairies are undoubtedly real, but the most humanistic fae are evasive. The existence of an organization that attempts to track fae affairs and cement a knowledge base, combined with the multitude of types, gives me a Market of Monsters vibe as far as the world goes, not the horrific and amoral character motivations.

lol wtf ever. She knows when she is being a dick to her colleagues but completely insensible as to how she is being received by strangers? sometimes I feel like neurodivergence becomes an excuse to be able to write incomprehensible characters

The tone of the fictional author sounds slightly off but I’m sort of intrigued by the hostility of the Scandinavian community that Emily is trying to ingratiate herself to. She is a blundering academic who lacks tact with people who have suffered and are obviously still suffering from the fae. Also, LOL at potential love entanglement with her acknowledged “95%” certainly fae colleague.

It’s time to read a contemporary impulse buy and this is the oldest one!

It’s too bad that this premise is confined to a single, slim Discworld novel; it moves just slightly too fast to really relish Pratchett’s universe. I also realize that the things from the Dungeon Dimensions are handy as some sort of Ultimate Evil in the absence of a more concrete villain, hanging in the background of the Light Fantastic, this book, and reappearing in Sourcery, but they aren’t very compelling.

Treatle haply illustrates the gendered bias against witchcraft, insisting that it’s the place for women to practice magic while also insisting that it’s inferior to the HIGH magic of wizards, and we have Granny rallying against it for Esk’s sake. Also I just remembered a joke that’s a long way off in the series - something like “I would have given my right arm to be named Two Dogs Fighting”.

I recall some of this as I happen upon events like signposts. I definitely remember Esk’s stab at borrowing with the eagle, particularly the triangular chunk of flesh. Hilta Goatfounder, not so much, but she is such a fun character as a contrast to Granny.

The premise of this book is way more intriguing than the previous two. I am surprised at just how violently Granny Weatherwax opposes Esk being marked by wizard’s magic but that’s a fun twist to the events; Drum is content to see what the hell happens with the first female wizard in a, well, reckless sort of way without which the ensuing chaos would be disabled.

Oh thank goodness the evil adults are just as stupid as the useless adults

Five years of books from now I should re-read this series because there are wealths of literary references that I can pick up as name drops but would mean something very different if I were better-versed in them, like with Poe and Orwell.

and ref to haruki murakami I can’t even—- just assume every name is a literary reference. Mikhail bulgakov in the same sentence was a Russian post-Dostoevsky author

AND madame bovary, lol. oh god she - nevermind.

The only reason I know that Dalloway was a cold-ass reference to Virginia Woolf is because I had recently started looking into reading her work and recognized the last name o.O

Hal may be the most sensible adult to be found in the books so far. Apart from his dogged insistence on not letting anyone read information, anyway

Okay, breaking with the foster parent formula has added IMMEASURABLY to the energy of this installation